Kai Havertz has a strange contract problem.
He earns an estimated €17M a year, the second-highest salary at Arsenal.
In 2025/26 he played 647 Premier League minutes - just 19% of the schedule.
Put those two facts next to each other and the club side of the negotiation almost writes itself: top-of-market wage, bottom-of-the-squad usage, two long absences in thirteen months. Reprice the contract.
Except the performance data says something very different.
Across his three Arsenal seasons, Havertz sits around the 89th percentile of Premier League attackers for attacking output. He is at the 95th percentile for aerial duels won. Among centre-forwards, his creation sits around the 94th percentile. And in the injury-shortened 2025/26 season, his per-90 attacking rate was the highest of his career.
Then came another twist. By the start of 2026/27, Havertz was fit again and Arsenal were starting him at centre-forward in every competitive match.
So what exactly are Arsenal supposed to price: the player, or the risk that the player is not there?
That question bothered me enough that I built a full contract-negotiation assessment around it: 69 pages of playing time, performance, wages, market value, replacement cost, simulations and contract structures.
Below I’ve summarized the most important points.
One important caveat before we start: this is a public demonstration case study. I do not know whether Arsenal and Havertz are negotiating, what either side wants, or what either side would actually argue. The exercise is simply: if both sides sat down tomorrow, what could each side defend with the data?
Once I stripped the report down to the few things that actually move the negotiation, the case became much simpler.
Four tools.
Let’s get into it.
Why this negotiation is harder than it looks
There are really two Kai Havertz questions, and they receive opposite answers.
How good is he when he plays? The evidence is strong.
How much football did Arsenal actually get for the money last season? Very little.
That distinction matters because football wages usually bundle those two things together. A club pays for expected performance, but it also pays for the probability that the player is available to deliver it.
When both are stable, nobody notices the distinction. Havertz forces it into the open.
1. Separate playing level from availability
Was Havertz getting worse - or simply playing less?
Start with the most uncomfortable fact for the player: 2025/26 was not merely a below-average workload season. It was an outlier.
Havertz had spent most of the previous decade as an established first-team player. Across seven seasons before 2024/25, he never missed an in-season period of five weeks or more. Then the calendar suddenly breaks twice: roughly 102 days without a competitive appearance in early 2025, then another 147-day gap later that year.
Those absences crushed his volume. His league-minute share fell from 86% in his first Arsenal season to 61%, then to 19%.
But the performance rate underneath the missing minutes did not collapse with it.
On the pooled Arsenal record, Havertz produced roughly 0.53 non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per 90. Against the 173 Premier League attackers in the same three-season window, that places him around the 89th percentile for attacking output.
The profile is also unusual. Most high-output attackers do not win many aerials; most high-aerial attackers do not produce elite attacking output. Havertz sits in a sparsely populated corner of the market.
His profile is not perfect. Dribbling remains a genuine weakness even after I change the peer group. Some of his other apparently weak numbers disappear when he is compared with players doing the same job: progressive runs and passes into the box look ordinary against all attackers, but comfortably above average against centre-forwards.
That distinction is useful in a negotiation because it prevents both sides from arguing from the wrong denominator. The player cannot pretend the take-on weakness is not real. The club cannot price role-driven metrics as if they were evidence of decline.
What this gave Havertz: a clean way to argue that the recent problem was availability, not a deterioration in playing level.
What this gave Arsenal: the equally clean counter that rates do not pay for themselves. A top per-90 player who only plays 647 minutes still delivered only 647 minutes.
2. Price the same player twice
What should Arsenal pay for 19% availability? What about 85%?
This is where the case became much more interesting to me.
Havertz earns about €17M a year. On raw hierarchy alone, that is difficult for the player to defend after the season he just had: second-highest wage at Arsenal attached to the 20th-most league minutes in the squad.
So I built a wage model across 1,436 players in Europe’s top five leagues. It estimates what players with similar observable characteristics are typically paid, using attacking output, minutes, age, club wage bill, league and position.
The important thing is not the exact regression. It is what happens when the model prices the same footballer under two different availability assumptions.
Observed 2025/26 usage: the model values his wage at about €13.5M.
Restored starter usage: hold his performance rate constant but move him back toward an 85% share of league minutes, and the benchmark rises to about €16.7M.
His actual estimate is roughly €17M.
The model does not really disagree with Havertz’s salary. It disagrees with paying that salary for a season in which he is barely available.
That is a very different negotiation.
If the club believes 2025/26 is the new normal, €17M looks rich. If the club believes his starter usage has genuinely returned, the same model almost reproduces his existing contract.
The wage question therefore collapses into the same uncertainty as the sporting question: how much of the next contract should be priced as if Havertz is a starter?
There are other anchors, and most of them help Arsenal. Statistically similar profiles generally earn less. His realistic outside wage market is thin because only a handful of European clubs pay attackers at this level. Those are real club-side constraints.
But the range is now defensible rather than arbitrary: roughly €13M to €17M in guaranteed compensation, with the position inside that range depending mostly on the availability assumption.
What this gave Havertz: evidence that his current wage is not absurd if Arsenal expects him to be a starter again.
What this gave Arsenal: a quantitative reason not to guarantee the full amount before durability is established.
3. Price Arsenal’s walk-away option
What does waiting actually cost?
A contract negotiation is never only about the salary. The alternative matters.
For Arsenal, one alternative is to sell. But a player contract is a wasting asset: the same footballer is worth less to the selling club as expiry gets closer because the buyer is purchasing fewer years of contractual control.
Havertz is contracted to June 2028. The near-full-value sale window was summer 2026. By the time of this assessment, it had already closed.
Under the scenarios in the report, the remaining fee moves roughly like this: about €39-54M in January 2027, €25-49M in summer 2027, then zero at expiry.
That creates a subtle transfer of bargaining power.
The player does not necessarily become a worse asset as the contract shortens. But the club owns less and less of that asset. Value the club can no longer capture as a transfer fee eventually reappears on the player side through wages, signing bonuses and freedom of destination.
Waiting is therefore not neutral.
The other walk-away option is replacement. And here Arsenal run into the opposite problem: genuinely replacing the profile is expensive.
A mid-market replacement - roughly a €45M fee plus an €8M wage in the model - costs around €17M a year once the transfer fee is amortised. That is almost exactly Havertz’s current salary, for only part of the profile.
A close elite replacement pushes the annual cost toward €39M.
The internal option is obviously cheaper. Arsenal can hand the role to existing players. But after the summer departures, that also means concentrating the centre-forward depth into fewer bodies - precisely the type of squad risk a versatile player is supposed to reduce.
This does not make Havertz irreplaceable. In fact, one of the hardest points for his side to defend is that Arsenal can probably reach sporting adequacy internally.
It does make the club’s threat more complicated than “take less or we replace you.” The cheapest replacement is not like-for-like. The like-for-like replacements are not cheap.
What this gave Havertz: the argument that Arsenal cannot necessarily reduce salary cost without accepting either profile loss, squad-thinning risk or a large transfer bill.
What this gave Arsenal: the reminder that Havertz’s outside market is also narrow. Replacement is expensive for Arsenal, but moving at a €17M salary is not frictionless for the player either.
4. Stop arguing about the risk and put it in the contract
What if neither side has to be right today?
At this point the negotiation has a problem that more analysis cannot completely solve.
Arsenal can say: two serious absences in thirteen months are a new risk. Havertz can say: seven healthy seasons before them, eight absence-free months after them, and the club is already starting me again.
Both statements can be true.
A model can estimate the probability of another disrupted season. It cannot make either side certain.
So instead of forcing the disagreement into one fixed salary, I tried something more practical: make the contract move with the outcome.
The example in the report compares a fixed €17M wage with a structure around €11M guaranteed plus up to €7.5M linked to minutes and performance.
If Havertz plays only 25% of league minutes, annual pay falls to roughly €13.2M.
At 50%, around €15.4M.
At 75%, around €17.6M.
At 90%, roughly €18.5M - more than he earns today.
The point is not that those exact numbers should appear in a real Arsenal contract. I do not know the true bonus structure of his current deal, and public wage estimates capture base salary imperfectly.
The point is the mechanism.
If the disagreement is mostly about availability, the cleanest contract is one that pays more when availability materialises and less when it does not.
That allows the player to bet on his own fitness without giving up the upside. It allows the club to protect itself against the exact scenario it fears. Neither side has to concede its forecast before signing.
What this gave Havertz: a route to preserve - and potentially exceed - his current compensation if he is right about his return.
What this gave Arsenal: a way to stop paying top-of-market compensation through another lost season if the club is right about the risk.
The negotiation pack, assembled
Put the four tools together and Havertz’s contract case is much cleaner than the 69-page report makes it look.
Playing level: his underlying performance record is intact. The best player-side evidence is not the 647-minute 2025/26 rate alone, but the three-season Arsenal record and the unusual combination of output, aerial presence and creation for a No. 9.
Compensation: the wage model prices him at about €13.5M on last season’s actual usage and about €16.7M if starter usage is restored. The salary argument is therefore mostly an availability argument.
Alternatives: Arsenal can replace minutes cheaply, but replacing the full profile is expensive. At the same time, every transfer window that passes reduces the fee the club can capture.
Structure: because the key uncertainty is future availability rather than current level, the contract can price the uncertainty directly instead of forcing either side to win the forecast in advance.
The club still has a serious case.
Havertz was paid like one of Europe’s elite attackers while barely playing. Similar statistical profiles mostly earn less. His outside market at the same wage is narrow. And another long absence would weaken both his wage case and his transfer value quickly.
The player also has a serious case.
The data does not show performance decline. Arsenal have already allowed the best sale window to pass. The current team sheets say starter, not surplus. And buying a comparable external profile costs at least as much as the salary the club might be trying to reduce.
That is why I think the interesting negotiation is not really “€13M or €17M?”
It is: how much of the €17M should be guaranteed before the availability question is fully answered?
The part I would steal from this case
The Kevin De Bruyne case was about replacement cost. Ben White was about finding a dimension that ordinary per-90 analysis missed. Alex Greenwood was about fixing the frame when the market itself did not provide a useful price list.
Havertz gives us a different lesson.
Sometimes both sides are looking at the same evidence and disagree not because one of them is wrong, but because they are pricing different future states.
Arsenal can reasonably price the risk that the injuries repeat. Havertz can reasonably price the evidence that his level has not declined and his availability has returned.
The analytical mistake would be to force those two futures into one supposedly correct number.
A better answer is to identify the variable that drives the disagreement, estimate what each state is worth, and write a contract whose economics move with that variable.
That is the broader lesson I would steal: sometimes the best model does not tell you who is right. It tells you how to write the deal so you do not need to know yet.
Boom — that was the Kai Havertz contract negotiation in a nutshell.
Thank you for reading until the end ❤️
You can grab the complete version of the report below.
The full assessment runs to 69 pages and contains the parts I have deliberately skipped here: detailed peer pools, role adjustments, finishing, similar-player wages, market-value scenarios, with/without analysis, title simulations and the complete bilateral negotiation framework.
Talk soon,
Martin
For enquiries about tailor-made reports, drop me a line @ martin.angelov@datadealsfc.com