Anyone who’s ever visited the unassuming hometown of pharmaceutical giant Bayer will agree that Leverkusen (population: around 170,000) is quite different to London. But there are some similarities, starting with the weather.
“I’m used to it,” Granit Xhaka smiles when The Athletic mentions the dismal greyness hanging over the German club’s BayArena stadium.
On the other side of the boardroom window, by contrast to the sky overhead, golden beams from a hundred artificial suns are nourishing the pitch. Xhaka and his Leverkusen team-mates have been lighting up this place throughout the season with their football too, delighting supporters with a thrilling mix of durability and beauty, precision-engineered by a young, uncompromising Spanish coach.
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With half the season gone, they are top of the table, ahead of wealthier, more established sides and could well go all the way in multiple competitions. Sound familiar? But there’s one more common denominator that links this corner of western Germany and (north) London, perhaps the most startling one: Xhaka was, and is, at the heart of everything that has gone right for Arsenal and Leverkusen over the past few months.
Since moving back to German football in the summer after seven years in England, the former Borussia Monchengladbach midfielder has played a huge role in turning a side who had already started making waves under Xabi Alonso’s leadership last season into a veritable winning machine, going 24 games unbeaten in all competitions to start this one.
His impeccably composed and authoritative performances have run counter to his erstwhile image as a hot-headed irritant and earned him universal plaudits, with Kicker magazine praising Xhaka as “the key figure” in Alonso’s system, “the head of the team”, “the strategist (in central midfield)”, “a leader on the pitch and in the dressing room” and as somebody who has added “a new level of quality” to Bayer’s game and their team structure.
Xhaka is unsure if he’s playing the best football of his career. But he agrees he’s changed for the better.
“I’m different,” he says. “My mentality is completely different. I’m much calmer. Much, much calmer. There’s much more clarity and deliberation in my game. I know when to push and I know when to fall back, I know when to speed up the game and when to slow it down.
“When I was younger, there were many yellow and red cards, it was the same at the beginning in England. Experience teaches you that you don’t always have to go for the risky tackle. You can keep running with the player, you don’t have to go down all the time. I’ve made a huge step forward in the way I approach games.”
Getting older and wiser is only one third of the explanation, however.
Xhaka felt truly valued at Leverkusen before he had even arrived. Alonso and the sporting director Simon Rolfes, both former central midfielders, understood a team filled with talented youngsters needed a more seasoned pro to hold it all together on the pitch and lead by example. They told the now 31-year-old in their first meeting in March that they had earmarked him for that role, underlining their belief in him with a five-year contract.
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“I feel really appreciated by the club, to feel that support and validation for having made the right step is very important to me,” Xhaka says. “I knew I wanted to come here the moment I spoke to Xabi and Simon.”
Contrary to reports suggesting his German-born wife Leonita was one of the drivers of the decision, she actually needed a little bit of convincing at first.
“To be honest, she was against it,” Xhaka says. “Not against us going to Leverkusen, but against us leaving London. If you’ve lived in London once, you want to stay there — especially with the family. We thought it through a lot. ‘What do we do with school?’; my kids were born there, they had made so many friends. But in the end, it was an easy decision, for my wife and kids as well, because they saw the plan behind it.
“I didn’t move here to play at being the boss or the manager. Not at all. I came here to lead this young team a little bit thanks to my experience at a top level abroad.”
Adding a big voice to the dressing room was vital for Alonso, because he believes that discipline and commitment can’t just be ordained from the coach down, they need to be intrinsic to the squad.
“He wants players to take responsibility, he wants us to speak up if we see one or two players doing less in training, to keep the level as high as it is right now,” Xhaka says. “We are in the dressing room. We see things. He’s not there all the time. That’s why it’s up to us to sort things out.
“Fortunately, we have big personalities, even among some of the younger players. The mentality is superb. The boys are listening, they want to learn things and do them straight away out on the pitch.
“Maybe it was different before. When you get knocked out in the DFB Pokal in the first round (losing 4-3 to third-division side Elversberg in the German version of the FA Cup last season) it’s not a question of ability but attitude. It stems from the manager. But also from the players.”
Alonso might not always be around to keep an eye on his charges but Xhaka certainly has been.
When we speak, he had started every Bundesliga game and all three Pokal ties and only been rested in the Europa League on matchday five, after they had qualified for the knockout phase with four wins out of four.
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Staff at Arsenal were equally enamoured with his robustness. What’s the secret to being always available?
“I work very hard but most of all, on the mental side of things, ” says Xhaka, who also has 121 caps for Switzerland. “That’s most important. There are moments when you’re tired but I tell myself there’s no such thing as tiredness. You just focus on the next 90 minutes, and so on, that way you can play 20, 30 games in a row.
“There’s always pain and fatigue. I know my body really well, I know how to look after it. I also talk to the medical department here very openly about my needs, and the people around me are very positive in their outlook, as am I. When things are going less well, you need that positive thinking. It gives you strength.”
He’s had his fair share of things going less well, of course.
In his first few years at Arsenal, Xhaka frequently found himself as a lightning rod for all the anger and disenchantment that coloured much of the late years of Arsene Wenger’s reign as manager, with many critics comparing him unfavourably to Patrick Vieira and other midfield heroes of a golden age who, in reality, he couldn’t live up to.
After his team-mates had voted him captain during Unai Emery’s short-lived time as Wenger’s successor, Xhaka continued to divide opinion among the supporters. Things came to an ugly head in October 2019, as he was booed off when substituted with half an hour still to play in a 2-2 draw at home against Crystal Palace. Xhaka reacted angrily, including taking off his Arsenal shirt and throwing it to the ground.
“To this day, I can’t really say what happened to me (in) that moment,” he recalls.
“A week earlier, I felt something was amiss during the game at Sheffield United. But when you play away, you don’t really know who’s whistling. I simply couldn’t imagine it was our supporters.
“Palace was not a bad game from me, not a top game either. I was surprised seeing my number up, as captain, in the 60th minute. I thought it was maybe a misunderstanding, perhaps they thought I was p***ed off (with the substitution)? They booed me almost immediately. I thought, ‘OK, it’s me against 60 000, what do I do?’. Looking back, you regret things, but maybe you’re also happy that you did certain things. I’m still not sure… But I do know this: that day wasn’t easy.”
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Getting jeered by his own team’s supporters was painful, but not as hurtful as seeing his friends and family suffer as a result. “For me, in all honesty, it’s part of sports. Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. But for my family up in the stands, it was like a slap in the face. It hurt me more because it hurt them so much. I will never forget how bad my parents felt, how my wife felt.
“I was convinced I would get through it all, but for my parents and my wife it was hell. My agent was also in the ground. We were supposed to meet the club about a new contract two days later. That never happened, of course.”
GO DEEPER
Dear Granit: It has been passionate, complicated and very, very memorable
Xhaka was stripped of the armband. “I had many black days, sitting in my hotel room for away games, realising what had happened,” he remembers.
Not talking to his family about his fall from grace made things worse but he tried to keep how much he suffered from his loved ones. “I didn’t want them to feel bad, because they were more worried about me than I was. Perhaps they also wanted to protect me and not bring back those thoughts. But I was completely devastated.”
Four years on, he still struggles to understand how and why he got into that mess. But he’s very clear how he got out of it: Emery being fired a month later, with Mikel Arteta replacing him, saved his Arsenal career.
“The club showed me little respect even though I was the captain. It was clear they wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible, apart from one person: Mikel Arteta,” Xhaka says.
“When I met him for the first time, my bags were already packed and I was about to hop on a plane. With my heart and soul, I had already left the club. I said to him, ‘The solution is for me to go’. Mikel told me he wanted me to stay. But I wasn’t sure. I remember speaking to my dad at the time. He told me, ‘Let’s go’. For the first time ever, he told me to run away. He said there was no future for me at Arsenal.’
Arteta saw things very differently.
At a second meeting, the former Arsenal midfielder and captain told Xhaka that he was important to him. More than that, he wanted to build his team around him and play him in a new position — as a No 8. Xhaka was still unsure.
“I could not imagine myself playing for Arsenal again. I said to him, ‘I just want to be somewhere where the fans don’t boo me’. But he was so convincing. For the first time in my life, I took a decision without talking to my family first. I got up and said, ‘OK, I’ll stay’. We embraced and, from that day on, I returned to training and it was like nothing ever happened.”
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It was not quite that simple, though.
Xhaka admits to feeling nervous, like a kid making his professional debut, before his return game in the Europa League against Eintracht Frankfurt in late November — a 2-1 home loss which proved to be Emery’s final game in charge. “It was as if I was playing for Arsenal for the first time. I will never forget one of my team-mates coming up to me before kick-off and saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens, I’m with you’. It was a new chapter, a new beginning for me.”
Little by little, Xhaka recovered his confidence to become an important part of the team’s renaissance, playing further up the pitch, the veteran leader of the Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard generation.
“Mikel picked me up and brought me back to playing at a level I always knew I could play at, he was sure of my quality and didn’t care what anyone else said,” he says. “Four years later, it ended with me almost scoring a hat-trick (against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the final game of the season in May; his 297th and last appearance for the club) and Arsenal fans screaming that they wanted me to stay.
“It was a goosebumps moment. I can’t describe in words how happy my family were hearing that after everything that had gone on before.”
More good news came that month, when the FA, the Gambling Commission and the National Crime Agency cleared Xhaka of any involvement in a possible betting scam following a yellow card he received in December 2021. “Was it a huge relief (to see the investigation dropped)? No. Because the club and I knew all along that it was total nonsense,” he says.
Xhaka had a year left on his contract — with an option for the club to extend for another year on top — when Leverkusen contacted him in the spring.
He talked to Edu, Arsenal’s sporting director, who told him that Arsenal were not ready to give him a new contract at that moment. Leverkusen didn’t want to force the issue too much out of consideration for him and with Arsenal being involved in the title race but his mind was quickly made up.
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“On one hand I was a bit sad (that Arsenal didn’t want to extend), but on the other hand I was also quite happy because I didn’t like that uncertainty,” Xhaka says. “Leverkusen’s plan for me was clear. Leaving Arsenal after seven years wasn’t easy on an emotional level after all the good and the bad things, but it was totally the right decision. I’m happy it worked out so well.”
In Alonso, he has met a former midfielder turned coach whose methods are closely aligned with those of fellow Basque Arteta. Both are sticklers for details who break down the game into its constituent parts and work on improving on every single one of them until collective, exponential growth kicks in.
“Mikel showed me a whole new way of looking at football, by focusing on the basics — the stuff from your teenage years you might have forgotten. Pressing. Body shape. Positioning. Movement. Coming out of someone’s cover shadow. Communication on the pitch,” Xhaka says. “Xabi is so similar. The Spaniards see football differently than the others, I think. When I heard Xabi speak about his ideas for the first time, I thought, ‘I’ve done this before, under Mikel’. It’s a different coach, but the same philosophy.”
Alonso is more hands-on in training — “he runs more than some of the players” — and is eager to show his squad how to do certain things on the pitch, Xhaka explains, whereas Arteta preferred video analysis and tactics boards to get his message across. But they both exude natural authority and command huge respect because of their skills as footballers.
The quality of their coaching — clinics in the art of being a central midfielder — is the third big reason why Xhaka feels his game has become much more measured and exact in the last few years. “I’ve learnt so much from both of them,” he says.
Xhaka has also profited from studying for his own coaching badges, adding a theoretical dimension to his footballing education.
Every Tuesday, he takes charge of SC Union Nettetal, the fifth-division amateur team of his brother-in-law Leonard Lekaj as part of his A licence course. But he’s still a professional footballer first and foremost, and determined to win big with Alonso’s Invincibles. “We have to challenge for trophies every single year,” he says.
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They certainly are this season. Few would have expected them to lead the table in Germany at the winter break, but it’s no mystery to Xhaka, who saw last season how far a well-drilled team with “young rockets up front” can go. For Saka and Gabriel Martinelli at the Emirates, read Jeremie Frimpong and Florian Wirtz.
Arsenal couldn’t quite maintain their run as they battled Manchester City for the Premier League championship in the spring, which begs the question of whether he learnt any lessons that can be applied in Leverkusen’s looming title race.
“You have to keep your feet on the ground,” Xhaka says. “We were super-close (with Arsenal) last year but we couldn’t quite keep it up. You need a bit of luck. I’m certain that we would have won the league if we hadn’t lost William Saliba (to a season-ending injury in March) and Thomas Partey (who missed four straight starts around then, including a home defeat to City).
“It’s the same thing here. If we all stay fit and healthy, and nothing stupid happens, we can stay up there for a good while longer.”
Xhaka says he has no regrets about leaving Arsenal but that is not to say he doesn’t care about them anymore. He talks almost every day to Arteta’s assistant Carlos Cuesta and remains friends with Partey, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesus and Cedric Soares; he watches as many of their games as possible and desperately wants them to win the Premier League.
He and his wife will take advantage of German football’s upcoming winter break to attend the home game against West Ham on December 28. “It will be our chance to say goodbye to the players, the staff and the supporters properly,” he says.
While he’s at it, Xhaka can also check out how his successor as their left-sided No 8 spot is doing. Kai Havertz, after all, is on a journey that resonates following his summer move from Chelsea.
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“I know what it’s like for Kai, when people on the outside are a little bit nervous and the fans get restless. He just needs to stay calm. It’s a new position for him and it takes time to fully understand Mikel’s philosophy,” Xhaka says of the Leverkusen old boy. “But he’s getting better all the time and his confidence is coming back now. Everyone knows his potential but having the confidence of your club, your manager and your team-mates is everything. You always need that backing.”
History, he suggests, can repeat itself to the point that Havertz’s struggle for direction and impact sees a similar happy ending to his own time at the club. “Arsenal supporters sometimes can take a bit of persuading to change their minds,” Xhaka says. “But at the end, I won them around.
“I hope for Kai that he will do the same, and that the critics will eat their words.”
(Top photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)
