A year ago, the best wingers in the world were playing somewhere in Spain, France, Italy, Germany or England. In other words: where they always play. Vinicius Junior was having his first true-superstar season with Real Madrid. Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah were having their last joint-superstar season together with Liverpool. And Kylian Mbappe was, well, Kylian Mbappe.
Throw in Rafael Leao, who was driving AC Milan to their first Serie A title in over a decade, and these were the defining players at the defining position in the modern game. At least, as far as we knew.
In fact, at this time last season, one of the best wingers in the world might not have been playing soccer at all. After Russia invaded Ukraine last March, FIFA announced that all foreign players in Russia would be allowed to suspend their contracts and join new clubs in other countries. And on March 24, 2022, a player you'd never heard of signed with a team you'd heard of in passing.
After 11 games with Dinamo Batumi in his native Georgia to wrap up the 2021-22 campaign, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia signed with Napoli for €11.5 million last summer. Almost immediately, he not only became a player you knew; thanks to his name and his irresistible skill with a soccer ball, he turned into a player you couldn't forget. He's the first player -- ever -- to score 10 goals and assist 10 goals in his inaugural Italian season. It's still March.
Call him whatever you want -- Kvara, Kvaradona, Kvaravaggio, Che Kvara -- but the facts are undeniable. Along with striker Victor Osimhen, the 22-year-old Kvaratskhelia has Napoli on the verge of their first Serie A title since Diego Maradona was playing in Naples. Not only that, but they're more likely to make the Champions League final, per FiveThirtyEight, than any other team in the world.
This is an era in which Real Madrid are spending tens of millions of dollars on Brazilian teenagers every year, Barcelona are starting multiple midfielders who can't yet rent a car in Connecticut, 18-year-old Kylian Mbappe cost €180 million for PSG to acquire, and Premier League players like Bukayo Saka and Trent Alexander-Arnold become club legends before their mid-20s. And yet one of the best players in the world -- a large, unstoppable, know-it-as-soon-you-see-it winger -- was playing in the Erovnuli Liga for the 543rd-best team in Europe (according to ClubElo.com) as recently as last May.
How did everyone miss Kvara? How the heck did he get here? And what, if anything, does his star turn say about the way soccer works -- or doesn't work -- today?
The unlikely rise of "Kvaradona"
It's not totally accurate to say that Kvaratskhelia came out of nowhere. In 2018, the Guardian listed him as one of the 60 best young talents in the world. Such is the nature of player development, though, that most of those players never become stars and some never become professionals at all.
In February 2019, Kvara moved from FC Rustavi in Georgia to Lokomotiv Moscow on loan, made seven appearances and scored one goal. The deal wasn't made permanent, which led then-Lokomotiv manager Yuri Semin to say that "losing that extremely talented boy made me cry." Instead, he joined Rubin Kazan, a mid-tier Russian club, in the summer of 2019.
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For Napoli this season, Kvaratskhelia is averaging 1.04 non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes. That comes from 10 goals and 12 assists. Among all players in Europe's Big Five leagues with at least 1,500 minutes played so far this season, only four have been more productive: Neymar, Erling Haaland, Osimhen and Lionel Messi. This is the company he's currently keeping.
Damn, I can't even imagine what he did to Russia. He must've ripped that league to shreds, huh?
Not quite.
In Russia, Kvara was the one thing that he's never been with Napoli: just sort of... fine. Across four seasons in the Russian Premier League, he scored 10 goals and created 10 assists -- total. Per 90 minutes, that comes out to 0.38 goals and assists. For a winger, that would barely be just about average production in one of Europe's major leagues.
Russia, of course, is not one of Europe's major leagues. The RPL has essentially been cut off from the rest of the continent at this point, meaning it's a little tougher to compare the quality of the league to others than it used to be. But based on the ClubElo ratings, which update each team's rating based on their results and the quality of their opponents, there are 12 better leagues in Europe. Funnily enough, the Russian league rates out very similarly to Italy's Serie B.
Kvaratskhelia went from average attacking production in a Serie B-esque league to superstar attacking production in Serie A -- almost overnight.
"I don't think anyone could have predicted quite how well he would do in Serie A, or how quickly he would adapt," said Tim Keech, one of the co-founders of MRKT Insights, a data and scouting consultancy that works with clubs all across the world.
"If you looked purely at his goals and assists up to this season, you would have classified him as a very exciting but inconsistent winger. He had always shown exceptional dribbling ability and a willingness to take opposition players on, but he was doing it in deeper, wider areas of the pitch. He was shooting a lot too, but from low value areas."
In Russia, Kvaratskhelia was the kind of player who stretched aesthetics and efficiency about as far apart as possible. His ability to carry the ball made him stand out to scouts and coaches -- but like so many young dribblers, he didn't really help his team win. He slowed down possession when he got the ball, and he turned so many attacking-third opportunities into long-range shots that rarely turned into goals.
Outside of a striker who gets really hot in front of goal for one season, these types of wingers have historically been massively overvalued by clubs around the world. However, over the past year, two things happened that altered his trajectory.
The first: he moved back to Georgia.
In his two months back home, per MRKT Insights data, he was basically a taller version of Lionel Messi: dribbling past defenders for fun, slipping in through balls left and right, racking up touches inside the penalty area, and scoring close to a goal per game. He was better than everyone, at everything. Looking back, it was the kind of performance you would've expected from him in Russia.
Granted, the Georgian league is probably closer to, say, the NCAA Division I level than Serie A, but it at least represented a tiny suggestion that he could turn all that dribbling into winning plays. Although Napoli had reportedly been monitoring Kvara for two years, perhaps that brief blast-off back home gave them the final bit of confidence they needed to make the €11.5-million move over the summer. And by bringing him to Italy, they created the second factor that pushed the Georgian into stardom.
What was it?
"Playing on a better team," said Keech. "It's perhaps the most underrated aspect of being seen as a good player."
How to find a hidden superstar
The easiest way to look at the soccer landscape is as if it's a pyramid.
At the bottom, you've got, well, something like the Georgian league. Somewhere in the middle is Russia. Then there's Portugal, the Netherlands and perhaps Belgium, then the Big Five leagues at the top. The simplest way to conceptualize the relationship is that a percentage of your effectiveness disappears as you move up the pyramid, while the opposite happens when you move down it. Generally, that is how it works.
Most analyses of player production find something similar:
The numbers say that the Premier League (not the Russian one) is the most difficult league to play in. (See y-axis.) Numbers never lie, so of course this is correct.
— Tony (@TonyElHabr) June 18, 2021
Please harass @canzhiye if you disagree. pic.twitter.com/zMMZKuVa0l
However, that's not always how it works.
"One of the major tasks in analytics has been to try and apply some weighting to raw statistics and try and create an exchange rate between leagues," said Keech. "So we may traditionally have thought a striker from the Netherlands would score fewer in the Premier League, all other things being equal. But all things aren't equal. There are so many factors that make a transfer succeed or fail."
Maybe Kvara was being asked to play a certain way in Russia. Perhaps the qualities of the 10 other players around him meant he could only find space in deeper areas and then had no one to pass to in the final third, so his only options were to dribble from his own third and attempt a bunch of bad shots. At Napoli, he's now playing with one of the best strikers in the world, along with a talented group of midfielders, and with a much more accomplished manager in Luciano Spalletti.
"Playing in a better team means you generally see more of the ball, you are closer to the opposing goal, and you don't have to try and do everything yourself," said Keech. "We can see in the statistics: he's playing 50% more passes with Napoli than he did at Rubin Kazan, he's dribbling 50% less, and he's shooting from more central locations closer to the goal."
I mean, come on:
𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖 𝙜𝙤𝙖𝙡, 𝙆𝙫𝙖𝙧𝙖 🔥🇬🇪 #NapoliAtalanta pic.twitter.com/RlPQeO0Q62
— Lega Serie A (@SerieA_EN) March 12, 2023
The long-range bombs haven't disappeared -- and they're still not leading to many goals -- but every inverted winger seemingly has to attempt them in order to keep the defense honest. However, Kvaratskhelia's added plenty of high-value attempts inside the box, too:
The dribbling is down, but he's still dribbling a ton: 90th percentile in successful 1v1s, 92nd in progressive carries among all wingers in the Big Five leagues, per FBref. And rather than dribbling, say, into attacking third, he's now dribbling into the penalty area: 3.08 per 90, 97th percentile at his position. All of that obvious potential is now being pointed, almost directly, at the opposition goal.
These are all of his carries that ended inside the box:
Despite the situational factors, there's also the possibility that Kvaratskhelia just got older and therefore got a lot better. This happens all the time with players in their early 20s. Were he still in Russia -- or out in some other mid-tier league -- maybe he'd also be lighting up the opposition. We'd see clips of him every weekend, and he'd be the player everyone wanted their favorite team to sign this summer.
But even if his improvement is purely down to his own internal development, it doesn't change the larger implication for the wider soccer world: If a superstar was hiding in the Georgian league less than a year ago, then how many other top-level talents are waiting to be discovered throughout the less-fancied leagues across the globe?
In addition to Kvaratskhelia going supernova, the success of Brighton this season suggests the answer is "a lot." Midfielder Moises Caicedo was signed straight from Ecuador as a teenager, while Kaoru Mitoma was a little-known Japanese winger playing in Belgium who didn't become a pro until he was 23. They were acquired for a combined €8 million, and they're already two of the best players in the biggest league in the world.
"Brighton is an interesting case study", Keech said. "Mitoma had similar data in Japan to Kvaratskhelia in Georgia and also adapted albeit after a loan period in Belgium."
It's impossible to scout the entire planet in the traditional sense, so teams, like Brighton, that use data to aid in recruitment have a massive leg up on the competition when it comes to uncovering the game's hidden stars. "You would think that would be a very good thing to have someone at every professional game in the world, just writing down everything a player did," Keech said. "And that is essentially what data is."
He also pointed to midfielder Aissa Laidouni -- now with Union Berlin, but who put impressive stats with the worst team in Romania -- and center-back Jakub Kiwior -- now on Arsenal, formerly of the Slovakian league -- as other players whose numbers helped unearth them from lightly scouted leagues.
Given how many big-money transfers go bust -- read: most -- it's bordering-on-baffling how few teams seem interested in an approach that can identify legitimate stars for the cost of a backup keeper.
"Within a few years, these players ended up being highly valued players, but clubs find it far easier to buy from tried and tested leagues," Keech said. "However if you actually look at the relative cost it may actually be cheaper to take some lower-cost bets, again as Brighton have: buying five players at £8 million rather than one at £40 million. Yes, you'll get some failures but you'll also spread your risk."
There's the risk of the failed transfer, but then there's another, even scarier one: the risk of having to play against someone like Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, week after week after week.