Khvicha Kvaratskhelia: PSG's Driving Force in the UEFA Super Cup

The World Cup was billed as a festival for the biggest names. Most of them delivered. The glare was relentless, the narratives familiar.

But as the club game restarts with the UEFA Super Cup in Salzburg, the stage tilts towards a different kind of star. This is Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s window to steal the light back.

PSG’s catalyst returns

At 25, Kvaratskhelia is not just another winger riding the wave of Paris Saint-Germain’s dominance. He was named Champions League player of the season as PSG defended their crown in May, driving a side already stacked with elite talent to a second straight title.

Now he comes into August hunting a threepeat in Europe’s premier competition, a quiet reminder that perhaps the continent’s standout performer never set foot at the World Cup at all.

Others in Paris have their medals and accolades. Marquinhos has lifted the Champions League trophy twice in PSG colours. Desire Doue and Vitinha walked away with man-of-the-match honours in the finals in Munich and Budapest. Ousmane Dembele collected the Ballon d'Or after spearheading that first historic European triumph.

Yet the turning point of this era can be traced back to one moment: Kvaratskhelia’s arrival from Napoli in January last year.

Before he landed in Paris, PSG’s European performances carried a hint of frustration. Talent everywhere, but a missing edge. A sense that something in the structure, the mentality, the aggression, was not quite right.

That changed fast.

Kvaratskhelia ripped through that complacency. He turned PSG into a pressing machine, his relentless running and fearless dribbling perfectly aligned with Luis Enrique’s demands. More than that, he dragged standards up around him. Forwards chased harder. Transitions snapped quicker. The whole front line began to look different.

Villa know the danger

Aston Villa, PSG’s opponents in the Super Cup, do not need a scouting report to understand the threat. They have already felt it.

In the first leg of their 2025 Champions League quarter-final, it was Kvaratskhelia’s dancing feet that left Axel Disasi reeling. That tie, arguably PSG’s sternest test in their knockout run, swung on moments like those – the kind that Kvaratskhelia seems to conjure when the pressure tightens.

Last season, his influence deepened as the stakes rose. From the play-off round onwards, no player scored more goals in the competition. He also finished with the most Champions League assists from open play. Not padding, not late cameos. Big contributions in big games.

The body of work is starting to look serious.

Long before Paris, he had already etched his name into another city’s history. At Napoli, he powered a title charge that ended a decades-long wait and challenged the old myth that only Diego Maradona could deliver that kind of miracle. The nickname ‘Kvaradona’ did not arrive by accident.

A one-off in a world of systems

Part of the fascination with Kvaratskhelia is that he does not fit the modern template. He is an outlier, both in story and in style.

Many of his PSG team-mates are products of the French system – academy structures honed over years, talent pathways refined, players shaped from a young age in high-performance environments. England has followed a similar route, reworking its academies and riding the rise of the Premier League to produce stars accustomed to elite surroundings.

Kvaratskhelia came from a different world.

Leonid Slutsky, his coach at Rubin Kazan, captured it neatly in 2023. “Nobody knew about him before he came to Italy and that is understandable,” he said at the time, before delivering the line that still feels prophetic: “I congratulate Napoli because they won the lottery.”

Slutsky spoke of his “abnormal thinking” on the pitch, his instinct to do things differently when others follow patterns.

Xisco Munoz, who played and later coached at Dinamo Tbilisi, believes that background is everything. “In Spain, we stop and pass, maybe learning on a training ground or at school,” he told Sky Sports. “In Georgia, it is street talent. In Georgia, they play their football on the street. They have to fight and have the contact. It is difficult to teach this in school.”

That edge is visible every time Kvaratskhelia picks up the ball wide on the left and drives, not just past one defender but at an entire defensive shape, as if the rules do not quite apply to him.

Relentless work, rare rest

Behind the flair sits a hard, almost obsessive, routine. David Webb, who worked with him in the Georgian national set-up, remembers a player who simply would not leave the training pitch.

“He is very process-driven,” Webb has said. “It is not something that he does for effect. He has done it since day one.”

That relentless schedule has barely paused in recent years. He dragged Georgia to Euro 2024. He then played at the Club World Cup last year. For a long stretch, there was always another tournament, another campaign, another demand on his body.

Georgia’s failure to qualify for this summer’s World Cup changed that. For Kvaratskhelia, it cut both ways.

On one hand, it finally handed him a window to breathe, to reset physically after years of continuous football. On the other, it may cost him when the Ballon d'Or votes are cast. History offers only thin comfort: Kevin Keegan managed to win the award in a World Cup year without England at the tournament, but that was a different era, when only European players were eligible and Argentina had just lifted the trophy.

This time, the field is crowded. World Cup-winning Spaniards will have a strong case. The relentless scoring of Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane for club and country will be hard to ignore.

Salzburg, and another statement

That is what makes the UEFA Super Cup more than just another shiny piece of silverware for Kvaratskhelia. It is a platform.

Against Aston Villa, he has the chance to reassert his claim as the driving force of Europe’s best team, to remind voters and viewers alike that the most devastating wide player in the Champions League has spent the summer away from the international glare, sharpening his tools.

His game still carries that dual purpose: it decorates matches with moments that live in the memory, and it drives PSG’s entire system forward. He entertains and he hurts you.

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the outstanding player in last season’s Champions League and the warrior winger at the heart of Paris Saint-Germain’s reign, walks into Salzburg not as a supporting act to the World Cup stars, but as a man ready to seize the narrative all over again.