Modern football has pushed No.10s like Kai Havertz to the brink of extinction
The Germany international has spent the last three years playing in just about every position except for the one he thrived in at Bayer Leverkusen. But that's not the midfielder's fault.
In the 2009 reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise, the Scottish engineer and somewhat stereotyped comic relief character, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, is frantically trying to figure out a way to get James T. Kirk back on to the USS Enterprise despite it departing at a speed faster than light. Spock - the one from the original TV series and in this case from the future - is fortunately on hand to tell Scotty how he figures out the mathematical puzzle before him.
The key to the problem, apparently, is not to think of the subject passing through space but the other way around. “Imagine that,” blurts out Simon Pegg in his best but still somewhat unconvincing Scottish accent. “It never occurred to me to think of space as the thing that was moving!” Not only is this a crucial plot twist that allows the galaxy quest to rumble into the third act, but it’s also what popped into my head when I sat down to figure out why Kai Havertz was playing left-back for Germany against Turkey and to this day remains such a frustrating and deeply misunderstood player.
Havertz hasn’t really changed much at all as a player over the course of the last seven years. Since day one at Bayer Leverkusen, he’s always been a lanky, technically-gifted attacking midfielder that’s capable of superb goals and assists in equal measure. When I recently asked someone high up at Leverkusen’s youth academy, who was not only on hand to scout Havertz once upon a time but also played a large part in developing the player, what has gone wrong since he departed the Bundesliga his answer was pretty simple: The problem is that football has changed a lot since 2016 and in many ways the role of the No.10 has not only morphed into something different but in many cases it has been wiped entirely from the tactics boards of Europe’s top leagues.
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