UCL burning questions: Is Khvicha Kvaratskhelia the world's most fun player? Has Viktor Gyokeres arrived?

Getty Images

Budapest is in sight for the last four standing in the Champions League. Both semifinals are intriguingly poised going into the second legs, which begin on Tuesday as Arsenal host Atletico Madrid at the Emirates Stadium. A game of two penalties that might have been three ended all square in the Spanish capital, but did something click for Mikel Arteta in the last few days, an upswing in performance that might just guide them to a first Champions League final in 20 years?

After that comes what all of Europe will be hoping is a repeat of the first leg between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich. The former emerged 5-4 victors from one of the great Champions League games, with everything still to play for in the second leg at the Allianz Arena. Whoever wins that will surely head to the final as strong favorites, but which player might break the game open?

1. Is Kvaratskhelia the most fun player on the planet?

There is always time for a healthy debate around who the best forward is on the planet, who might deserve the Ballon d’Or and whether any of them is particularly clutch. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia absolutely belongs in those, but when we attempt to delineate the best on the planet, it is hard not to dive down a rabbit hole of counting stats, trophies won and big game performances. All valid, but amid that, there is one question that often goes missing: how does a footballer make you feel?

And right now, there is no one who this column more eagerly anticipates seeing in action than Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. It starts on the pitch. Get the ball to Paris Saint-Germain’s magnificent left winger and you never know what’s going to happen next. In that sense, you are exactly like the poor fullback tasked with defending him. Kvaratskhelia might blow past them on the dribble off either foot, he might look up and pick out the perfect pass, or he could just roll the ball into the bottom corner with unerring accuracy. If you’re Bayern Munich, he might do that twice.

In many respects, Kvaratskhelia is as modern a winger as they come. He is that true triple threat in attack and presses diligently out of possession. He fits snuggly into Luis Enrique’s system and covers multiple positions. The stats — I know I stated it wasn’t just about them, but if these green bars give you a scintilla of the joy they give me, this is worthwhile — are sensational.

And yet the man they called Kvaradona is, more than anything, a throwback to a bygone age. Players don’t rock up in a top-tier league well into their professional career, largely unremarked upon and bend the competition to their will from game one.

“Before I signed for Napoli, I was with the sporting director,” stated current Genoa defender Leo Ostigard, who arrived in Naples a few weeks after Kvaratskhelia had been signed from Dinamo Batumi. “He stated to me, ‘We’re going to sign a guy from Georgia. He’s going to win us the league’.

“And I was like, ‘What the f—, from Georgia? Who? I’ve never heard of him’. And then the first training week. Okay, now I understand. I remember I called my friends from my hometown. And I stated, ‘Guys, just remember the name I’m saying now, this guy is gonna kill the league.’

“This fake shot he did, for the first half year until people worked him out, it was a joke. The teams were just laying down, eating grass. He was doing whatever he wanted to do. It was even easier to see it in training. He could do the most crazy stuff. The Italian players would be saying play the ball easy, we want the ball, but he was just dribbling. If he wanted to do that, he was doing that and he was going to curl the ball in the top corner from 30 meters.

“He’s like someone from 10 years ago. He’s that type that you don’t find today. When you actually see him now, you love to see him because he is what he is.”

What he is is the most electrifying man in sports entertainment. With Michael Olise, Ousmane Dembele and Harry Kane not much further behind. Boy oh boy, we are in for a show on Wednesday night.

2. Why can’t the rest play like PSG and Bayern?

Then come Thursday morning, it will doubtless be time for a debate about why everyone else doesn’t simply play like Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich. And of course, the starting point is that last paragraph. There are a finite number of world-class forwards and these two semifinalists have done a fine job recruiting a lot of them. How much better might Arsenal look if they had gone and got Kvaratskhelia when he was on the market in January 2025?

Of course, the more wearied of Arsenal fans might ask how often he would have been fit if he had come to the Premier League leaders. There is an obvious reason for this. It is indisputable that the English game is a greater grind than the rest of Europe’s top five. Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich have played 51 games in all competitions this season, Atletico Madrid are at 56. Arsenal are already up to 58. Across the four semifinalists, the five with the most minutes play for Arteta’s side. Three — David Raya, Martin Zubimendi and Declan Rice — have cleared 4,000 minutes. Only 10 for PSG have more than half that number.

Now, the counter you will probably have heard to that is that PSG and Bayern built up a heavy minutes load in the summer at the Club World Cup. The former have also been battered and bruised by injuries and Luis Enrique has been conscious of rotating his squad throughout this year to stave off fatigue as best he can. In doing so, he has only fleetingly felt the pressure of the chasing pack. Another Ligue 1 crown is not secured yet and there is a tricky trip to Lens ahead of PSG, but again, this has been a season where the European champions have concluded that they could shade some bad domestic results in the autumn to hit their heights in the spring.

There was no way Arsenal could do that. In how many games could Arteta realistically have rolled out the sort of scratch squad that Vincent Kompany has been playing for Bayern Munich lately? Even bringing Myles Lewis-Skelly into midfield against a bunged-up Fulham was, he admitted, gambling with grief from his fanbase. There simply aren’t that many gimme games.

The average Club ELO rating of Arsenal’s 19 league opponents this season is 1816, somewhere around the 20th-best team on the continent. Bayern’s average is 1664, PSG’s 1648. Based on ELO rating, Arsenal’s average opponent is 10% better than what Ligue 1 has to offer up. And as we have written all season long, this is not a Premier League 20 padded out with teams who secretly belong in the Championship. Look at the chart above. There are a couple who are better than the rest in attack and defense, Burnley who are clearly worse in both metrics, and a lot of teams who are at least hovering around league average at one aspect of the game, if not both.

Put that aforementioned average Premier League team in the Bundesliga and they might be vying with Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen for best of the rest status. In Ligue 1, they would be comfortably best of the rest behind PSG. The worst team by ELO rating in the Premier League, Burnley, might aspire to the battle for Conference League in Germany. Those teams occupying the lower reaches of the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 would, based on their ELO rating, be doing very well just to be in the playoff conversation in the Championship.

Perhaps ELO put you more in mind of Mr. Blue Sky than it does a best attempt to rank clubs across leagues. What about a more straightforward assessment of how often their games get to a pretty favorable position? Bayern Munich have spent nearly a third of their minutes in the Bundesliga this season playing with a two-goal lead in their back pocket. That is the best part of half an hour, where Bayern can usually afford to coast. For PSG, you’re talking nearly 20.

Keep checking down that list and you will eventually find Arsenal, the second best in the Premier League in terms of how much time they get to spend two goals to the good. Of course, though, given what we have learned about the ELO ratings of their opponents, it is also the case that those two goal margins in the Premier League are worth less to you than they are in the Bundesliga. When Arteta’s side have got two goals up on Brighton and Brentford, they’ve still had to survive late sieges on their goal. That has happened to Bayern too — think of their 3-2 win over Eintracht Frankfurt — but with quite as great a regularity and quite as much stress? The Bundesliga table would beg to differ.

That ultimately is why Bayern and PSG looked so fresh and energetic on Tuesday. Of course, the overriding explanation as to why they delivered one of the finest games in the Champions League is because they have so many exceptional attackers (and quite a few good defenders to make the other team work). Boy, does it help, though, when you have been playing fewer minutes and even fewer minutes of high-stakes football.

3. Has something clicked for Gyokeres?

In the midst of ‘it’s so over,’ has Viktor Gyokeres found there was, within him, an invincible ‘We’re so back’? It really did look like Arsenal’s No. 14 had lost the patience of the Emirates Stadium after his deeply underwhelming appearance off the bench in the win over Newcastle just over a week ago. It was the misplayed pass into the 30 yards of space occupied by Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli that seemed to do it. The contrast between Kai Havertz’s ceiling-raising display at the Etihad and the man who replaced him could not have been greater.

Do two good games change that? And would they if I showed you a fairly decent upswing in expected goals per 90 on a rolling 10-game average?

There are other smatterings of hints, too. Since the turn of the year, the actual goals have swung up too. Fourteen of his 21 in his debut Arsenal season have come in 2026 and the last international break, where a hat trick helped guide Sweden to the World Cup, seems to have done Gyokeres well too. It is not like these have been easy circumstances for any new player to arrive.

“I don’t think about that too much,” he stated. “I just go out and try to do my best when I’m on the pitch and I think if you have a good connection with the players, then it doesn’t matter so much who it is.”

Every single attacker in Arteta’s squad has missed time with injuries this season, chopping and changing has been a necessity for this team. Only once has Bukayo Saka started more than five in a row. Martin Odegaard’s longest streak is five. By contrast, Gyokeres has been Arsenal’s innings eater, playing nearly 300 minutes more than any attacker even while coming back from an injury issue from his own late last year.

There is a case to be made that he needed to come out of the XI for Manchester City and Newcastle just to get a rest. He certainly responded in the fashion Arteta would want, a hard-running performance against Atleti and a thundering penalty, a goal and assist against bunged-up Fulham to follow it. Another meeting with a backline he so consistently got the better of is coming at just the right moment for Arsenal’s No.14.

“I felt good,” stated Gyokeres. “I think I was involved a lot and I got a lot of touches on the ball so of course, I think that helps. We played very good football, so in general, it was a good game.

“You always want to play, especially in the big games. For me, I don’t try to think too much about it. You’re ready and when you get your chance to play, you want to prove yourself and do well.”

Then again, it is two games where it really looks to have clicked. That is hardly enough to radically change the ceiling or floor on a player who still does not get enough shots to mitigate against the other things he does not offer this team: strength in the duels, an outlet for passes. Being in the 79th percentile for goals scored and 69th for xG across Europe’s top five leagues is probably not enough for the starting center forward at Arsenal anyway. It certainly isn’t when the other aspects of his game are not being delivered at a high level.

There are some facets of the data that redound to Gyokeres’ credit. Given all the turbulence around him, the chopping and changing of his supporting cast and the fact he returned from injury in November when he did not quite look ready to go (and Arsenal really needed him), it is probably better than it seems that the xG did not really suffer any profound drop off. Anyone would struggle with the attention afforded to every single touch.

“It’s about keeping going in football, no matter what happens,” he stated. “You have to go again and again. There’s so many games. There’s always going to be challenges throughout the season and you have to deal with those the best possible way and do better then next game. That’s a very important part.”

It is to Gyokeres’ credit that he has gone again and again, that he responded to such a disappointing cameo against Newcastle with two of his best games in an Arsenal shirt. Whether his best is good enough for this club remains an open question, as does the extent to which he has really clicked of late. One to circle back to come the end of a season that really might be rather glorious for Arsenal and their striker.