Kai Havertz left Frank Lampard and Thomas Tuchel with same feeling before Arsenal transfer

Kai Havertz might not be everyone's cup of tea, but he's a big favourite among former Chelsea managers. The 25-year-old German has had a mixed start to his Arsenal career, with spells of good form spliced between moments of ineptitude.

He joined the Gunners from Chelsea in a £65million move back in 2023, and has since bagged 19 goals in 60 matches for the north Londoners. After an unsuccessful stint playing as a No. 8 in Mikel Arteta's side, Havertz has settled into a more familiar false nine role, and Arsenal have been reaping the rewards.

The 25-year-old has five goals in nine games so far this season, and ended the 2023/24 campaign with 13 Premier League strikes - five more than his highest single-season tally at Stamford Bridge. The Blues never quite worked out how best to use Havertz, deploying him at No. 8, No. 10, No. 9 and on the wing, but it wasn't for the want of trying.

Frank Lampard, who managed Havertz in both of his two spells as Chelsea boss, on the Arsenal ace ahead of the club's Champions League win over PSG on Tuesday night, insisting it was obvious from day one just how talented he was.

"I brought him to Chelsea as a young player. When he came to Chelsea it wasn't quite clear [where to play him]. He was a very talented player... I think we never got to the end of the story at Chelsea [in figuring out] what was his best position.

"The faith that Mikel Arteta has shown in him by bringing him to the club, and the faith that he's stuck with him, because I've got some Arsenal friends and when he first arrived there were question marks. They asked me, 'What is he like?' and I said, 'No, no, trust me, he's a talented boy, he just need to work the Premier League out a little bit more and grow into it'."

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Lampard isn't the only former Blues boss enamoured with the silky German. Thomas Tuchel, who tried to sign Havertz when he was at Bayern Munich, frequently sang the player's praises during his 19-month stint in west London.

"The guy is so full of talent he will not have a relaxed second with me," Tuchel said back in September 2021. "Because if you have this amount of talent you have to push yourself to the absolute maximum and the absolute maximum for this guy, nobody knows. He has the body, he has the talent, he has the head, he has belief to play at the very top, he has everything."

In March 2022, he gushed about how important Havertz was to Chelsea's on-field philosophy at the time. "What he gives us is huge volume. He covers a lot of metres, he covers a lot of metres in high intensity, so he finds the intensity no matter what the system the opponent defends against us, he finds intensive runs, he finds distances. This is what makes him and he uses his body more and more."

Lampard was similarly complimentary on Tuesday, and even suggested Havertz could take his game up another notch or two: "He's added a consistency of goals to his game and there's a strength about his game. Arsenal now are this physical, powerful team, and I always felt when I brought him to Chelsea that he'd be this physical, powerful player at the top of the pitch," the Blues legend noted.

"But he's also got this lovely touch and elegant movement and very fluid movement and first touch to bring people in. So there are a lot of facets to his game, and I think he's even got more improvement to do."

Havertz began his career at Bayer Leverkusen and, after breaking into the first team aged just 17 in 2016, was quickly earmarked as the next big thing of German football. He scored 46 goals in 150 games at the BayArena before Chelsea snapped him up for £72m in 2020.

He scored the winning goal in the Champions League final at the end of his first season at Stamford Bridge, forever etching his name into Chelsea folklore, but largely failed to live up to expectations at the club despite scoring a relatively healthy 32 goals in 139 games.