Bayer Leverkusen counting with Kai Havertz for Europa League campaign

After a brief hiatus, those German teams who are still involved in European competitions have returned to the training pitch. The Bundesliga concluded their pandemic-delayed season at the end of last month already, but many still have business to take care of, including Bayern Munich against Chelsea in the Champions League, and, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League.

Bayer could in fact be considered one of the favorites for the competition, especially as it’s set to transition to a single-elimination tournament held in Germany instead of the usual home-and-away two-legged ties. As we should know from a certain match held in Germany, anything can happen in 90 minutes (well, 120 plus penalties but who’s counting).

The reason we care about any of this is course a certain Kai Havertz, who’s increasingly looking likely to join Chelsea this summer in a move that should set up well for winning every match by a 5-4 hockey score next season.

But recent reports made it clear that Havertz will not be pulling a Timo Werner and leaving his team before the conclusion of this season’s European campaign. And as the players, including Havertz, returned to training yesterday, Bayer manager Peter Bosz reiterated that expectation.

“Kai is with us for the start of training and I expect him to be available for the Europa League.”

“The players are the same for the Europa League as with the Bundesliga and the DFB Cup. We can’t use loan players or summer signings. [And] it doesn’t make any sense to me to deal with [transfers] before the Europa League. We want to be in this tournament to the end. Then we’ll work hard on planning.”

-Peter Bosz; source: Bayer 04 Leverkusen

So that seems pretty clear, regardless of any talks may or may not be ongoing or set to start behind the scenes, between both the player and his current club, the player and his future club, or the two clubs themselves. While we seem to have agreements for the first two situations, the latter, including what’s bound to be a massive transfer fee (€70-100m), is still very much up in the air.

Bayer’s Europa League campaign resumes on August 6 with the Round of 16 second leg against Rangers (Bayer lead form the away leg, 3-1). The shortened tournament will wrap up with the final on August 21.

Good luck to us, and them, and Kai.