BATUMI, Georgia — They used to worry that the Adjarabet Arena, with its sinuous arches and illuminated exterior, would turn into something of a white elephant. Batumi, after all, is a quaint resort town; it had little need for a 20,000-capacity stadium. Dinamo, the soccer team that was to call it home, generally required seating for only half that number.
And then, at the start of April, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia arrived.
“The city lived from one match to the next,” Tariel Varshanidze, a prominent voice in Dinamo’s fan scene, said. “The atmosphere changed radically.” Matches in the Erovnuli Liga, Georgia’s top division, suddenly had the same air as “top Champions League games,” he said. “It was fantastic.”
In the three months Kvaratskhelia spent in Batumi, every seat was taken. Tourists who flocked to the beaches of the Black Sea added a game to their itineraries. Friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances all started to ask regular attendees for spare tickets, whether they supported Dinamo, someone else, or nobody at all.
During games, Varshanidze said, the whole stadium cheered Kvaratskhelia’s every touch, even those fans who had theoretically come along to support the opposition. And it was not just in Batumi. “We had full stadiums in almost every city,” George Geguchadze, Dinamo’s coach, said. All of Georgia wanted a glimpse. Even games in the country’s backwaters, at stadiums that in normal times might attract only a few hundred spectators, were sold out.
That was hardly a shock. Kvaratskhelia (pronounced kuh-varats-kell-eeya) had arrived in Batumi as an established national icon. He had blossomed as a 16-year-old sensation at Dinamo Tbilisi, Georgia’s biggest club. By the time he made his debut for his country, barely two years later, he had outgrown the Georgian league, moving to Russia to join Lokomotiv Moscow and then Rubin Kazan. The brief, unexpected chance to see him in the flesh again — after he was freed to void his contract after Russia invaded Ukraine — was too good an opportunity to miss.
What few could have anticipated was how fast, and how far, that mania would spread. Scarcely six months later, the 21-year-old winger’s fame has spread far from Georgia. In a matter of weeks, he has enthralled Italian soccer and emerged as the breakout star of the Champions League.
“Georgian fans expected him to play at a high level,” Geguchadze said. “But nobody could have imagined he would have such good results in such a short period of time.”
Those fans who flooded to the 11 games he played in Batumi’s colors, it turned out, were getting a sneak preview. The man who filled the Adjarabet Arena was about to become the best player to watch in Europe.
The Rarity of Anarchy
The raw numbers are these: Since joining Napoli for around $10 million this summer, Kvaratskhelia has scored five goals in the Italian league, where his team has established a two-point lead at the top, and two more in the Champions League, helping Napoli qualify with ease from an intimidating group featuring Liverpool and Ajax. The totals are good, no doubt. But they do not even begin to explain the phenomenon.
His coach at Napoli, Luciano Spalletti, has described Kvaratskhelia as “stratospheric.” Arrigo Sacchi, the former Italy and A.C. Milan coach, prefers the word “devastating.” A World Cup winner, Alessandro Del Piero, who is not unqualified to gauge the quality of attacking players, suggested he looked like he was “made to play in Europe.”
Napoli’s fans granted him their highest honor, nicknaming him Kvaradona, after the most beloved playmaker in the club’s history.
Perhaps the most telling testimony, though, belonged to Fabrizio Ravanelli, the former Juventus striker. After Napoli beat Milan last month, Ravanelli admitted he had been captivated by Kvaratskhelia and Milan’s Rafael Leão. “In the world,” he said, “there are fewer and fewer players like them.”
That sense of rarity is the root of Kvaratskhelia’s appeal. He is the sort of player that modern soccer — with its industrialized youth systems and stylistic templates — does not produce anymore: mercurial and intuitive, faintly maverick, somehow untamed.
Willy Sagnol, the Georgia national team coach, has suggested that his closest parallel is a young Franck Ribéry, the former Bayern Munich wing, but it is not an exact match.
Kvaratskhelia is taller, more languid, less easily categorized. Ribéry was a player of menace and purpose who wanted, much of the time, to cut inside. Kvaratskhelia might do that. Or he might not. He might play as a No. 10 for a few minutes.
Or he might, as he did in a game against Lazio a few weeks ago, ignore three safe passes, pirouette amid three defenders and then arrow a shot against the post from 30 yards.
His strength, to Levan Kobiashvili, the president of the Georgian soccer federation, is his “unpredictability.”
“There are a lot of wingers who are technically gifted and very quick,” Kobiashvili said. “But Khvicha offers something completely different. I don’t think we have seen many players who have such a relentless attacking style, who do everything at such speed, not only in Georgia but in Europe. Everything is through his instincts. That is what makes him so exciting.”
Kobiashvili demurs at the idea that Kvaratskhelia is the “continuation of any process.” Georgia might have a rich history of producing virtuosic attacking players — most notably the former Manchester City and Ajax winger Georgi Kinkladze — but Kvaratskhelia, he said, is a product only of his own talent.
Others are not quite so sure. “He has some aspects that are very Georgian,” said Andrés Carrasco, the Spanish head of youth development at Dinamo Tbilisi, the club that unearthed Kvaratskhelia. “He tends not to worry if something does not work. He does not think about the negative consequences. That is true of a lot of attacking players here. They are daring. They’re bold. They’re a little bit anarchic.”
And there are, Carrasco said, more to come.
The Boom
In Batumi, as in Georgia as a whole, soccer fans have followed Kvaratskhelia’s starburst as avidly as they did when he was briefly a player at Dinamo Batumi, living in a hotel not far from the stadium. Now it is Napoli’s games that grind the country to a halt. “Everyone is gathered around televisions,” said Kobiashvili, himself one of the most decorated players in Georgian history. “I can’t remember anything like it.”
But he, like Carrasco, is keen to emphasize that Kvaratskhelia is not alone. Georgian soccer is on the rise. When Kobiashvili took up his post as Georgian soccer federation president in 2015, the country was languishing “around 150th in FIFA’s rankings,” he said. It currently stands 78th.
Even more impressive, though, have been its performances in the Nations League. Georgia has been promoted twice — initially from the competition’s lowest tier to its third and then, this summer, to the second division — meaning that in the next edition of the tournament, it will play at the same level as England.
“We have numerous talented players, and they are contributing collectively to this euphoria,” Kobiashvili said. He pointed, in particular, to Giorgi Mamardashvili, an imposing goalkeeper now shining at the Spanish club Valencia, but he could have named Zuriko Davitashvili, too, a teammate of Kvaratskhelia’s at Batumi who now plays for the French team Bordeaux.
Their emergence has not gone unnoticed. But Kvaratskhelia did not spring from the ether: There are no secrets in European soccer, and a host of major teams across the continent had been aware of his gifts while he was in Russia, if not before. Juventus and Tottenham had watched him. Napoli had been tracking him for two years.
“He was a little bit of a victim, in a way,” Oleg Yarovinski, Rubin Kazan’s general manager, said. “They liked him, but maybe they did not need him.” Rubin Kazan, he said, never received a single offer.
When he hit the open market in March, after FIFA granted all foreign players in Russian soccer the right to cancel their contracts unilaterally, Sagnol, the Georgia national team coach, began working his network of contacts to try to get him a move to western Europe. He said he was met largely with skepticism.
“All I heard was that he was a player who was tired after the 70th minute,” Sagnol told the French radio station RMC Sport. “They said: ‘You know, Willy, he’s just a Georgian, he’s not Brazilian. It’s less glamorous’.” So Kvaratskhelia decided to return home, to Batumi, to bide his time.
His successors are not likely to have the same problem. Next year, Luka Parkadze, a 17-year-old winger who came through the Dinamo Tbilisi academy, will join Bayern Munich, after being sent there for a successful trial earlier this year. “We do not get a lot of scouts in Georgia,” Carrasco said. “So we have to make the effort to help them know our players.”
Carrasco describes Parkadze as “very attacking, unafraid, who understands individual play, he appears in big games.” It sounds familiar.
“Only a few years ago, kids in Georgia aspired to be the next Lionel Messi, the next Cristiano Ronaldo,” Kobiashvili said. “Now it is Khvicha and Mamardashvili. They have transformed the whole soccer culture in Georgia.”
Nowhere is that truer than in Batumi. When Kvaratskhelia eventually moved on, leaving the Adjarabet Arena behind for the grandest stages in Europe, Dinamo Batumi found itself with a problem. Attendance at the stadium reverted to normal. Many of the tourists and the sudden converts disappeared.
The club’s academy, though, was overwhelmed. It had received 10 times the usual number of applications. It now has 800 players.
“We have to build two new pitches, find new coaches,” Varshanidze, the Dinamo Batumi fan, said. For years to come it will be living with, and benefiting from, those three gilded months when it was home to the most exciting player in Europe.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
