Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the closest thing modern football has to a throwback winger: a left-sided dribbler who wants the ball on the touchline, wants a defender in front of him, and wants to go past him. Paris Saint-Germain paid a lot of money in January 2025 to add exactly that, and he repaid it inside five months with a goal in a Champions League final.
This is the full profile — who he is, how a teenager from Tbilisi became Napoli’s folk hero and then PSG’s No.7, what he actually does on the pitch, and where he fits into Luis Enrique’s Paris in 2026/27.
Who is Khvicha Kvaratskhelia?
Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is a Georgian winger, born on 12 February 2001 in Tbilisi, who plays for Paris Saint-Germain and captains the Georgia national team. He wears No.7 in Paris and operates almost exclusively from the left flank, cutting inside onto his right foot or driving to the byline.
His father, Badri Kvaratskhelia, was a professional footballer and a Georgia international, so the surname carried weight in Tbilisi long before Khvicha did anything with it. In Naples they eventually replaced it altogether — Kvaradona — which tells you most of what you need to know about the impression he made in Italy.
From Dinamo Tbilisi to Russia
He came through at Dinamo Tbilisi and made his senior debut as a teenager, with a loan spell at Rustavi to get minutes. By 2018 he had moved to Russia with Lokomotiv Moscow, and in 2019 he joined Rubin Kazan, where he spent three seasons establishing himself as one of the most watchable young attackers in the league.
That chapter ended abruptly. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kvaratskhelia left the country and returned home to sign for Dinamo Batumi, and the Georgian league became an unlikely shop window. Napoli were watching.
Napoli: the season that changed everything
Napoli signed him in the summer of 2022 for a fee widely reported at around €10m — a figure that looked absurd within about six weeks. He arrived as the replacement for Lorenzo Insigne, a club captain and local icon, which is the kind of job that has swallowed better-known players whole.
Instead he produced one of the great debut seasons in recent Serie A history. Napoli won the Scudetto in 2022/23 — their first in 33 years, and their first since Diego Maradona — and Kvaratskhelia was named the league’s most valuable player. The left wing at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona became appointment viewing: step-overs, a low centre of gravity, defenders committed and beaten, and a city that had waited a generation losing its mind every weekend.
He stayed two and a half seasons in total, and by the winter of 2024/25 the biggest clubs in Europe were circling.
The PSG transfer
Paris moved in the January 2025 window and got the deal done, with the fee reported in the region of €70m. It was unusual business for a club mid-season and mid-rebuild: PSG had already dismantled their galactico model with Kylian Mbappé’s exit, and Luis Enrique was assembling something faster and more collective. Kvaratskhelia was the specialist the shape had been missing on the left.
The fit was immediate. Paris won a domestic double and then the Champions League in 2024/25, beating Inter 5-0 in the final in Munich — and Kvaratskhelia was on the scoresheet alongside Achraf Hakimi, Désiré Doué and Senny Mayulu. Five months after arriving, he had the medal PSG had spent well over a decade chasing. Paris then retained the trophy in 2025/26, making them back-to-back European champions going into this season.
What Kvaratskhelia actually does on the pitch
- One-v-one dribbling. The core of his game and the reason he was bought. He takes defenders on from a standing start and beats them at a rate very few wingers in Europe match.
- A low centre of gravity. He is strong through the hips and difficult to knock off the ball, so he keeps possession in areas where wingers usually lose it.
- Shooting from the left half-space. Cut inside, open the body, curl it towards the far post. It is the single most repeatable pattern in his game.
- Chaos as a tactic. He will attempt things that break down, and Luis Enrique accepts the failure rate because the successes tend to be goals.
What has changed in Paris is the work off the ball. Luis Enrique’s system demands that the front line presses first and hardest — the same demand that reshaped Ousmane Dembélé‘s career — and Kvaratskhelia has had to do considerably more running without possession than he ever did in Naples.
Kvaratskhelia and Georgia
He is his country’s captain and, without much argument, the best footballer Georgia has produced. He led them to Euro 2024, their first appearance at a major men’s tournament, and scored in the 2-0 win over Portugal that sent them into the last 16 — comfortably the biggest result in Georgian football history.
The status that comes with it is enormous. In Georgia he is not really a footballer so much as a national event, and the national team’s schedule is a genuine factor in how Paris manage his season.
Khvicha Kvaratskhelia at PSG in 2026/27
He starts this campaign as a first-choice forward in a squad reshaped again over the summer. Maghnes Akliouche arrived from Monaco, Ferran Torres from Barcelona, Mika Godts from Ajax and Lucas Digne from Aston Villa, while Gonçalo Ramos, Randal Kolo Muani and Lee Kang-in all left the club — the full group is set out in our PSG squad guide for 2026/27, captained by Marquinhos.
Paris have made a mixed start: a 1-0 defeat to Lens in the Trophée des Champions, a 2-2 draw away at Rennes to open the Ligue 1 defence, and a 2-1 Super Cup win over Aston Villa. The Champions League league phase now begins with Paris as holders, and their 2026/27 opponents are not kind.
His competition for minutes is real — Godts arrived from Ajax as a left-sided winger, Ferran Torres can play across the front, and Luis Enrique rotates without sentiment. But the left flank is Kvaratskhelia’s, and there is nobody else at the club who does what he does.
Why he matters to Paris
PSG’s post-Mbappé team is built on movement, rotation and collective pressing, which works beautifully right up until an opponent puts ten men behind the ball and dares Paris to find a way through. Kvaratskhelia is the answer to that specific problem: the player who does not need a system to create an opening, just a yard of grass and somebody to beat.
Every great PSG side has had one. This one bought a Georgian from Naples in the middle of a season and won the European Cup with him five months later.
Squad and player information is published by Paris Saint-Germain, with fixtures and results confirmed by Ligue 1 and European competition detail at UEFA.
