Kai Havertz said he is in line to start for Arsenal in the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest on Saturday, a return to the biggest stage for the 26-year-old after months of injury frustration. The German forward, who scored the winner for Chelsea in the 2021 final, is back in the frame as Arsenal chase the game that can define their season.
He is being searched for now because this is the kind of night that turns a season into a memory. Havertz won the 2021 Champions League final against Manchester City in Porto and has already shown he can decide one with a single touch. This time, he says the stage still feels extraordinary. “It is something I will never forget,” he said of that goal, adding that “as a kid I could have never dreamed I would score a goal in the final and win that game.”
Arsenal paid £65m to sign him from Chelsea two years after that night, and he has since carried the weight of big expectations through injuries and form swings. He finished as the Premier League’s top scorer last season despite missing its last three months with a hamstring injury, then missed almost five months after hurting his knee on this season’s opening day against Manchester United. After two surgeries and weeks in a knee brace, he returned in January.
Havertz said the spell out was mentally draining. “I was in a bad place when I was injured,” he said, describing days when “you are just inside a building. You cannot go out, you cannot walk, you do nothing.” For a player who said he had been told from January that “there is so much to play,” the timing of his recovery has pushed him right back into the sharpest part of the season.
There is also a reason his caution matters. Havertz said Arsenal will be ready, but he did not dress up the final as anything simple. “It is going to be hard, but we are going to be well prepared,” he said. That comes from experience: he called Chelsea the underdogs in 2021, and he knows from the inside that a Champions League final is not won by pedigree or history alone. “You need to get there, and then you still have to make that step and win it,” he said.
Arsenal have already taken a major domestic step by winning their first Premier League since 2004, but the European final is a different test and a different kind of pressure. Havertz said he will always be proud of the goal he scored for Chelsea, and this one offers him a chance to add another Champions League title to his record. Whether he starts or not, Arsenal’s next answer comes on Saturday in Budapest against Paris Saint-Germain, where one match will settle everything.
