Before the 2025 Champions League final last May, Jacob Whitehead visited Georgia to tell the story of Paris Saint-Germain winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. This is an updated version of that article. As a boy, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia would sit and wait for the apples to grow.Summers were spent in Tsalenjikha, his family’s hometown, cradled by Georgia’s Caucasus mountains. Between their house and the river was a green swathe, capped at one end by a wide iron gate. It was a perfect football pitch — but for one feature.Since anybody recalled, the gate had been topped with decorative ornaments. Kvaratskehlia’s father, Badri, a professional player himself, had countless footballs burst by its sharp metal. Remembering how he wept with every puncture, 30 years later he warned Khvicha, his second son.Soon after, hearing the thump of ball on metal gate, Badri stepped outside to check if his message had been heeded. But something looked different.Now, each spike was crowned by an apple. If a shot hit it? The ball would rebound harmlessly away. Each following June, Kvaratskhelia would repeat the ritual, plucking the early growers from the tree. He got through fewer balls than his father.A young Khvicha Kvaratskhelia playing for the Dinamo academy (Credit: Kvaratskhelia family)Badri, however, had a new problem: “There would never be grass in the yard; because all day, all evening, Khvicha played.”Perhaps his son’s ingenuity was to be expected. Regional identity is important in Georgia — though he was mainly raised in the country’s capital, Tbilisi, Kvaratskhelia’s family are Mingrelian, an ethnic group from the country’s west.“People from Samegrelo are smart people,” says Badri. “Very smart people, and very creative. We are mountainous people and we behave like it. If we shake your hand, it is done — no signature needed. This is how you need to understand Khvicha, this is the culture in which he was cultivated.”Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (right) with his brothers (Credit: Kvaratskhelia family)And though Tsalenjikha has a population of just 25,000, its inhabitants have had an outsized influence on Georgian history. The elegiac Terenti Graneli was the nation’s most significant poet for 800 years. Meliton Kantaria was the soldier who flew the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in 1945.But, as he looks to lift the Champions League trophy for the second year in a row, the fame of a 25-year-old winger has eclipsed them all.There is a homemade VHS tape in Kvaratskhelia’s home in Tbilisi, made by his mother Maka. With Badri often away for his career — he played in Azerbaijan for several years, even winning three caps for the national team — Maka wanted her family to stay connected.The cassette shows Badri playing for Azerbaijani club FK Shamkir in Champions League qualifying against Latvian side Skonto FC, where he scored a hat-trick. Kvaratskhelia would practise his father’s free kicks, over and over again.Ten years later, he repaid his father for the inspiration.With Kvaratskhelia taking his first steps in professional football, Badri became dangerously ill. Doctors told him he needed to have emergency heart surgery but the family could not afford it.Ultimately Kvaratskhelia’s first salary at Lokomotiv Moscow, on increased terms, paid for the surgery that saved his father’s life.“It wasn’t even a question to him,” says Badri.Kvicha Kvaratskhelia’s parents, Badri and Maka, in Tbilisi (Credit: Jacob Whitehead)Badri was at last season’s 5-0 Champions League final win for PSG against Inter, in which his son scored the fourth goal. At moments of high emotion, for his own heart’s sake, he has to retreat into the family’s box.At his quickest, Kvaratskhelia does not run but flows, changing direction like a stream through rapids — as he showed last season with his fine goal against Aston Villa in the Champions League quarter-finals. Axel Disasi was taken underwater, foundering and falling. Kvaratskhelia’s shot was a knife thumping a message into the wall; this PSG side is a whole new force with the Georgian as its apex.