After spending time around youth soccer matches in Nashville and much of Tennessee, Nashville SC general manager Mike Jacobs has noticed a trend. When these young players score goals, rather than flailing arms or hitting the Griddy, the coolest thing an up-and-coming Tennessee player can do after finding the back of the net is a simple salute — the trademark of Nashville attacking midfielder Hany Mukhtar.
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On Tuesday, the German’s influence earned a more tangible distinction. Mukhtar was named the 2022 Landon Donovan MLS MVP on Tuesday, after scoring a Golden Boot-winning 23 goals and netting 11 assists for Nashville.
The salute, which started on a whim an ocean away, now symbolizes something more.
“In my old club, Brøndby, the fans were always walking through the city before a derby (against FC Copenhagen),” Mukhtar told The Athletic just after learning he won the league’s top individual honor on Monday morning. “If you look on YouTube, there’s videos of them and they’re walking like military, they’re so disciplined. They’re so strong and so loyal. My best friend told me one day: you should stand in front of them saluting, because your job is to score a goal and when you have done it, that’s more like a job done. That’s what you do for the fans. I love the celebration, and I feel like now with Nashville, it fits well.”
For much of the year Mukhtar was in a dead heat in the MVP race with Austin FC attacker Sebastian Driussi, who led the second-year side to an emphatic turnaround. But while Driussi’s 2022 campaign was impressive, Mukhtar’s could fairly be counted among the most dominant which any individual has had since MLS kicked off in 1996. In all, Mukhtar scored or assisted on an eye-watering 65 percent of Nashville’s 52 goals this season. As Mukhtar went, so went Nashville; an important distinction for a league whose top honor is “most valuable player” instead of “player of the year.”
“(MVPs are) not necessarily the best player, although I do think Hany was the best performer in the league this year,” said Jacobs. “I don’t think it’s even that close when you see his goal contributions, goals and assists, and what he meant to this team.”
The mutual affection between Mukhtar and Nashville is undeniable, and Mukhtar’s road to becoming a star in Tennessee is remarkable, too. In a league which is best known for its clubs’ budding youth development chops and a revolving door of marketable stars finishing out their primes, it’s someone like Mukhtar who may best embody the league’s standing in the global landscape.
Mukhtar was born and raised in Berlin. His father, Abubakr, came to the German capital from Sudan to earn a doctorate degree; while there, he met Ursula. The couple had two sons, the youngest of whom (Hany) quickly developed a passion for soccer. By age six, they were driving Hany 45-to-60 minutes each way to train with Hertha Berlin’s youth ranks.
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Mukhtar developed quickly, captaining Hertha’s U-17 team to a league title and representing Germany at every youth level from U-15 to U-21. On Sept. 26, 2012, Mukhtar became the club’s second-youngest debutant in a 2.Bundesliga match against Dynamo Dresden at 17 years, six months and four days old.
As the club earned promotion to the Bundesliga ahead of the 2013-14 season, an 18-year-old Mukhtar was eager to impress. However, he made just ten league appearances that season and spent the first half of 2014-15 with the reserves. Frustrated, Mukhtar opted not to renew his contract which was set to expire at the end of the year. In January, he was sold to Benfica for just $500,000 — a move which, at the time, was seen as a steal for one of Portugal’s most successful and popular clubs.
“I was living at home at that time, and then all of a sudden I lived in a different country,” Mukhtar said of the move to Benfica. “Everything was so much bigger. It was crazy. I was very young, couldn’t speak the language. It was pretty tough.”
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Mukhtar made just one appearance each for Benfica and its reserves team that spring before more upheaval hit – Jorge Jesus, the manager that brought him in was replaced by Rui Vitória that offseason. Mukhtar was then sent to RB Salzburg for a season-long loan, only for the manager who brought him there (Peter Zeidler) to be sacked in December. The season’s end, the midfielder had made 13 appearances for Salzburg and scored once.
“It wasn’t how I expected it,” Mukhtar says.
By the end of his stay in Austria, he was 21, out of consideration for a senior international debut with Germany, and seemingly no further along in his development than he was a year prior. Then came another loan, this time to Brøndby, a Danish Superliga side helmed by a compatriot, Alexander Zorniger. Also on staff was American fitness coach Ahron Thode, who now works as the Colorado Rapids’ head of performance and sports science. Thode describes Brøndby as “a traditional workers’ club.”
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“You’re expected to run and fight and give everything, cough blood and fall onto the pitch (after a match),” Thode said. “They actually accept if you lose the game, but if you’re not giving everything, then it can be a very difficult place to exist.”
Between the familiar background of his manager and the club’s more workmanlike ideology, Mukhtar was able to concentrate on his development.
“I was dreaming to play (in the) Champions League with Benfica, and then all of a sudden, two years later, I’m in Denmark,” Mukhtar said. “That was a very, very tough decision I needed to make. Luckily I had a coach in Denmark who believed in me and was German. He said, ‘hey, I believe in your strengths and if you come here, I will build you up and then you will definitely have the chance to go back to Germany or wherever you want to go.’ It ended up being really good because Brøndby was at that time the best step I could make. It’s a great club, great fans, great atmosphere, and they really believed in me from the first day.”
Among Mukhtar’s first tests was a Europa League qualifying tie against Hertha Berlin, his former club. He came off the bench in his hometown and then started the return leg, notching an assist in a 3-1 win. Things got better from there; Mukhtar served as Brøndby’s chief playmaker that season, using his ability on the ball to progress from the midfield to the attacking third. It was enough to convince Zorniger and Brøndby to activate the purchase clause on his loan, and Mukhtar won the Danish Superliga’s player of the year honor in his first year as a permanent member of the club.
As opponents caught on to Mukhtar’s skill, his goal contributions dipped. Brøndby fell to fourth in the league table, and Zorniger was under fire from the club hierarchy and fans alike for not prioritizing the development of Danish talent. (In one match, he managed to field a lineup completely free of domestic players in a league which is known to skew heavily toward players from Denmark.) Zorniger was fired in February 2019, and the club later appointed former Copenhagen coach Carsten V. Jensen as sporting director as they tried to change direction.
Yet while transfer offers had been coming for Mukhtar since his award-winning campaign (including one which Mukhtar said was from a club in one of Europe’s five top leagues), he was deemed too important to move along as the club underwent its transition. As he became a more rotational figure under new coach (and former Denmark U-21 boss) Niels Frederiksen, he wondered if it was time to test himself elsewhere.
“I was very happy at that time, but if the coach who brought you in and believed in you changed — even though the other coach was playing me and was good — it was a really, really unique connection with my old coach,” Mukhtar said. “More and more, I had thought okay, maybe I’m ready to make the next step, you know?”
While Mukhtar was thriving in Denmark, Nashville SC was living life in the second-division USL Championship, with an MLS expansion spot awaiting in 2020. Led by general manager Mike Jacobs and head coach Gary Smith — both of whom are still in the same roles today — the team planned for its top-flight debut with an eye toward the city the club would represent.
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Nashville is a mid-sized market by MLS standards. While it’s one of the great cultural capitals of the South, it was never going to have the same surface-level draw for foreign players as Los Angeles, New York City, Miami or Chicago. Still, the sporting staff knew that finding an elite playmaking No. 10 would be key to starting strong as an MLS team.
“We looked at positional profiles in each role and tried to have an idea, not just of what a number 10 looks like, but what was something we thought would work well for our manager and for our league,” Jacobs said. “Mukhtar was a name that came up when we were looking at certain facets or attributes that we looked for in a player in that position…it became apparent that he was the ideal fit for us.”
Mukhtar, then aged 23, had never been to the United States. There was little to know about the club itself, since it hadn’t even started play yet. He hardly knew much of anything about Nashville’s existence, either.
“My mom is a huge fan of Johnny Cash and I knew that somewhere (in Nashville) was connected to Johnny Cash, but much more, I didn’t know, if I’m honest,” Mukhtar says. “Normally when a club wants you, you look around: what system are they playing, who are the players, would I fit in the system? You watch some video of the team because you need to fit in the way of playing. Everything that they were saying was just a plan.”
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Still, the nascent club provided Mukhtar something which no other club — from Hertha to Benfica to Brøndby — could offer: true centerpiece status.
“I have a lot of friends in the soccer world — I never heard anyone say, hey, a team reached out and said they want to build the team around you,” Mukhtar says. “That was a sign of trust and the confidence I want to get from a club — and I need (that).”
Mukhtar wasn’t an obvious fit for the role, at least as it existed in MLS. From Carlos Valderrama in the league’s infancy to Sebastian Giovinco’s reign of dominance with Toronto FC, playmakers often enjoyed the limelight of chance creation and scoring without expectation to defend.
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“To be honest with you, that’s a big reason why we liked him,” Jacobs said. “We thought that to play that role successfully, both in our team in the league, we wanted more of a two-way type player, rather than like a designated attacking player: a guy who cruises on one side of the ball and only works when he has it.”
That wouldn’t fly in Nashville, where Smith was content to concede the possession battle. In 2020, the team debuted with the league’s second-lowest average rate on the ball (44.6%), building an initial identity as a team with a stout defense and tidy midfield. While Mukhtar wasn’t the archetypal flair player, the hard-working approach he’d refined at Brøndby made him a perfect fit for Smith and Jacobs.
“The second tier of European players, they work and they have to work,” Thode says. “They exist in running leagues: they run in Holland, they run in Belgium, they run in Denmark, in 2.Bundesliga — and I think that there’s not enough of that here (in MLS).”
There was one final hurdle to the transfer: Nashville didn’t have Mukhtar’s discovery rights (another of MLS’s oddities, where teams can claim “dibs” on a finite number of players outside of the league). Those belonged to the Seattle Sounders, which had tried to sign Mukhtar a year or two prior and held onto his rights. Jacobs said Seattle general manager Garth Lagerwey still rated the player, but was happy to work with the upstart MLS side if they could come to an agreement with Brøndby. Eventually, the clubs agreed on a $3 million transfer fee, and Seattle parted with Mukhtar’s rights for a cool $100,000.
Mukhtar signed on to one of Nashville’s three coveted designated player (DP) slots, enabling the club to pay him far more than MLS’s $612,500 maximum salary (he made a club-high $1.6 million in 2022).
However, Mukhtar still had plenty of development ahead of him.
Since becoming a coach, former Leicester City and Celtic midfielder Steve Guppy quickly realized that he had a passion for working with players on the art of beating defenders with the ball at their feet. He joined Smith’s staff for Nashville’s entry to MLS and soon had the perfect subject in Mukhtar, whose stepover had become a relied-upon move throughout his young career.
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“He has this sort of patented step over and then he throws his head up and it gets a defender to freeze for half a second, and then he pushes the ball with speed,” said Thode. “That was kind of one of his trademarks from the time he arrived (in Denmark).”
However, Guppy’s approach caught Mukhtar off-guard from the first day he arrived at Nashville’s first preseason training camp in Tampa, Fla.
“After dinner, he took me to the side and said, can we do a quick video? So we did,” Mukhtar recalls. “The video was like four or five minutes long and we watched it and it was all my stepovers. After the video, he asked me what do you think? I was like, yeah, I mean, I beat a player, which is good. The step-over works, they’re all successful clips. He said, yes, they’re brilliant, but we want to bring you through the final third.”
Guppy wasn’t done.
“Then he showed me videos of (Jamie) Vardy and totally different player types than I am,” Mukhtar says. “I was like hey, you guys want to build a team around me and now you want to change the way I’m playing?”
To Guppy, it was the final push needed to turn him into a true game-changer.
“What I saw in Hany was someone who is a very good player, but he was a different type of player to the one you see today,” he said. “He was more of an eight: link up play, bring people into the game. Taking players on was not part of his mindset. I went through his whole career at Brøndby and I think there were maybe two or three moments in the final third where he actually tried to take players on. I showed him and said look, as a number 10, being able to take players on and beat people is so important because you get to create chances for yourself and others rather than relying on service. As a ten, we really need you to be our shining light.”
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Mukhtar found it difficult to adapt to the new marching orders, but by no fault of his or the club’s own. COVID-19 put sports on hiatus in March 2020, after Nashville had played just two league matches. While they aimed to resume play in a bubble with the MLS is Back Tournament, Nashville was unable to participate due to a COVID-19 outbreak. By the time they were cleared to face FC Dallas for three matches after both clubs missed the tournament, Nashville hadn’t played a competitive match in over five months.
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But as it turned out, the additional reps on the training ground gave Guppy more time to reinforce the importance of the more progressive approach to his game.
“The honest truth of it is that he’s not necessarily massively into the art of taking players on — he’s into the art of scoring goals,” Guppy said. “He realizes that to be able to score more goals, he has to be able to create moments himself, and that’s where I’ve managed to tap in and get that agreement where we work on repetitions of beating players, let’s become better at it, and be able to then score goals and create chances for yourself and others.”
During games, though, Mukhtar struggled to grasp what Smith and Guppy were asking of him. While the stepover was still in his wheelhouse, it wasn’t translating in the final third. Until, that is, the team’s second postseason match against Toronto FC.
At the time, the Reds had made three of the four most recent MLS Cups, winning one and losing two to the Seattle Sounders. Still, Nashville looked unfazed, and Mukhtar provided the golden moment in extra time to give the visitors a 1-0 win over a soon-to-crumble MLS superpower.
NASHVILLE BREAKS THROUGH‼️@drioscal off the rebound in extra time!@Audi pic.twitter.com/d16ND0UbNW
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) November 25, 2020
“He did a magical stepover, beat three players in one movement, and he then got off his shot,” Guppy says. “He literally hasn’t looked back since then.”
Mukhtar’s embrace of his on-ball ability is evident in the data, as his dribbles per 90 minutes and touches in the final third have increased year-over-year since joining Nashville, just as his involvement in the middle third of the pitch has lessened.
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|
Dribbles att./90 | 2.23 | 2.92 | 3.79 |
Touches/90 | 50.6 | 52.5 | 47 |
% touches in mid 3rd | 56.90% | 50.40% | 45.30% |
% touches in attacking 3rd | 39.10% | 43.80% | 51.50% |
% touches in box | 4.40% | 7.20% | 11.70% |
Data via fbref.com
In 2021, Mukhtar finished second behind Carles Gil in MVP voting despite leading MLS in combined goals and assists (16 and 12, respectively). By the time 2022 arrived, teams were determined to neutralize Mukhtar. Thode, his former coach now with Colorado, lived it firsthand ahead of his team’s first clash with Nashville on May 28. In that game, Mukhtar scored a goal where the effortlessness of his movement confirmed that beating players was now his calling card.
WHAT A TURN
WHAT A FINISHHANY. MUKHTAR. 🫡 pic.twitter.com/oVuHqP7dCJ
— Nashville SC (@NashvilleSC) May 29, 2022
“I always tell the players every day: the reason they do the repetitions, which can be laborious and time-consuming, (is that) you have to be able to do a trick without thinking,” Guppy says. “Once you can do it without thinking, then you are a player. I just remember when Hany scored that goal at Colorado, I turned to Gary and said he’s a player — and he certainly is.”
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In the team’s second meeting of the season this past August, Mukhtar scored a hat trick in a 4-1 win.
“I absolutely told the players what their weaknesses are, and said they have to exploit this, they have to do this,” Thode said. “Against Hany, it just didn’t work. I guess it did a little bit for a period of time, but if you give Hany an inch and he’s feeling it, he will exploit it. It was a humbling f—ing experience, but I also couldn’t be happier (for him).”
Tuesday’s announcement serves as a confirmation of what’s been inevitable for a couple of months. Mukhtar has been the class of the league since the 2021 season began, and his 2022 season serves as an emphatic follow-up.
He also is one of a growing lineage of players who are changing the perception of MLS. Ever since Sebastian Giovinco traded a squad role with Juventus for a starring turn in Toronto ahead of the 2015 season, the league has increasingly moved away from using DP slots on older players like Beckham, Thierry Henry, and Cuauhtémoc Blanco. Rather, successful teams have recruited players in the hearts of their primes (between 24 and 32); players like Nicolás Lodeiro, Raúl Ruidíaz, Josef Martínez, Miguel Almirón, Carlos Vela, Javier Hernández, Xherdan Shaqiri, Lorenzo Insigne, Federico Bernardeschi, and many more on the way.
Mukhtar and Driussi skew on the younger side of this trend, but they, like many others, see MLS as an adequate launching pad to catch the attention of clubs in Europe’s upper echelons. That move has been validated by the careers of MLS exports like Alphonso Davies, Almirón, Brenden Aaronson, Tyler Adams and Jack Harrison. Even Zlatan Ibrahimovic left MLS with gas left in the tank, leading the line for AC Milan as they regained their place among Italy’s elite.
“It’s not a small league anymore, in my opinion,” Mukhtar said. “We’re not talking about a league which has no stars. We have plenty of stars. Players are coming into this league and are here with a huge profile. Winning these awards, Golden Boot and MVP, it’s a big honor for me; it’s not that it’s a small thing. It’s a huge thing for me and I couldn’t be more proud.”
As for Mukhtar himself, he still has some amount of desire to play in the UEFA Champions League. However, he’s realistic about both his chances of earning that move (he’ll turn 28 in March) and whether or not it would be an upgrade over his current status as a Nashville icon.
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“Every time I’m talking with German media, they ask me: do you still want to come back to Germany?” Mukhtar said. “I have two answers for that. The first one, do (I) really want to go back to Europe? No, it’s not necessary. The second is: do I really want to prove to people that I’m able to perform in Europe? Yes, definitely, and that will never change, but the desire to go back to Europe is not there right now. I’m very happy, but with soccer, you never know. I would not say I will stay, the rest of my career, here in the MLS. I’m not guaranteeing that, but I feel super here. I feel amazing here. I love the city of Nashville, I love the club, I love the organization. The rest, we will see.”
(Top photo: Andrew Bershaw/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)