As Nashville SC’s Hany Mukhtar goes, so goes MLS

NEARLY 20,000 IN Orlando’s Exploria Stadium fall silent as Nashville SC attacking midfielder Hany Mukhtar eyes a shot 35 yards from goal in the MLS Cup playoffs. He might as well shoot from EPCOT. But Mukhtar is the reigning MLS MVP with 19 more goal contributions than anyone else since his 2020 debut. Nashville swiped him from Europe, promising to build a franchise around him, for Mukhtar’s penchant for rendering the extraordinary ordinary. For moments like this.

His shot corkscrews and knuckles. Orlando City’s Pedro Gallese, an MLS Goalkeeper of the Year finalist, is wrong-footed; he shuffles to his right, back left, and leaps. His left index finger barely deflects the ball, hit with such force that Gallese falls to the turf and hails trainers. Mukhtar’s shot caroms off the crossbar and upward into the night, the echoing clang drenched in allegory. The final whistle blows and Nashville lose 1-0. The second leg of the best-of-three series is now an elimination match at Nashville’s Geodis Park tonight at 9 p.m. EST.

Mukhtar’s four seasons in Nashville have been punctuated this way: Thunderous, awe-inspiring, but lamentably short. Nashville were inches from winning the 2023 Leagues Cup, losing 10-9 in PKs to Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami in the final. They suffered quarterfinal MLS Cup playoff exits in 2020 and 2021, on two extra time goals and in PKs, respectively.

Mukhtar was raised in Berlin; he rose through Hertha BSC’s academy and debuted for the senior team at 17. He captained Germany’s 2014 U-19 European Championship run, failed catch on at Benfica and Red Bull Salzburg, but found purchase in Denmark at Brondby.

Now 28, Mukhtar is amid a rare dry spell; he’s contributed to 58.8% of Nashville’s regular and postseason goals as an MLS club — an astounding 100 total since an injury-shortened 2020 — but he hasn’t scored since late September. An unprecedented second straight MVP evaporated.

Before winning the MVP in 2022, Mukhtar was the 2021 MLS MVP runner-up then signed a contract extension. This summer, Nashville received a $7 million bid out of Qatar. Mukhtar demurred. He wants to win trophies here. He met his wife, Ashley, in Nashville. He got married at Geodis Park.

On the same night as Mukhtar’s near miss, 4,500 miles away from a rattled crossbar in Orlando, the biggest moment in MLS history happens without a pitch in sight. At Paris’ Theatre du Chatelet, a 36-year-old Messi accepts his eighth Ballon d’Or. He does so an MLS player, receiving the statue from Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham.

Mukhtar isn’t the wunderkind that clubs from the big five European leagues look to poach, nor is he over the hill. He’s played his prime in the United States. But he is a prominent face of the MLS, once a victory lap league for aging global stars that has now grown into a bona fide European factory line.

Mukhtar’s journey to Nashville — his desire to stay, thrive and bear witness to the further development of MLS — isn’t just a flourish on how far the league has come since Beckham’s L.A. jaunt; it’s also a harbinger of where it’s headed.

AT NASHVILLE’S NEW training facility in Antioch, Tenn. — with a state-of-the-art film room, therapy pools and cryo chambers — Mukhtar remembers his introduction to MLS. He would stay up late in Denmark to watch, stunned when Zlatan Ibrahimovic followed up Manchester United with the LA Galaxy.

“I was surprised at the league’s level,” Mukhtar says. “It’s so physical.”

But in early 2018, MLS’ global reputation was suboptimal. It was better known as where Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and Andrea Pirlo collected one last check before coaching. When Beckham left Real Madrid for MLS, league commissioner Don Garber called it “perhaps one of the most important moments in the history of the sport [that Beckham will spend] the rest of his career in the U.S.” Eighteen months after his debut, Becks tried to engineer a permanent transfer to AC Milan.

“The caliber of the players in the league was underpinned by more expenditure and focus on the financial side to bring those players in,” says Nashville SC manager Gary Smith, who was with Colorado from 2008 to 2011. “The league has moved in leaps and bounds: training grounds, stadiums, better PR, the [Apple] TV deal — there’s so much more support in the infrastructure and investment in the league.”

Dax McCarty played with Arsenal and Barcelona great Thierry Henry in New York from 2011 to 2014; he’s seen the before and after.

“The retirement league trope, it’s always going to be associated with MLS because that’s how the league had to grow ten years ago,” McCarty says. “It’s not how we have to grow now.”

Mukhtar gestures to Nashville’s training facility as a marker for the league’s development.

“There are maybe 10 or 15 teams in Europe that have this kind of facility,” he says. “Europeans have to see [what I’ve seen] in the last four years, how the league is growing. This is just the start.”

MLS may still eschew promotion/relegation, but it’s a thriving unofficial farm system for European soccer’s Big Five leagues. In the last five years, Miguel Almiron, Alphonso Davies, and Jhon Duran were transferred to Newcastle United, Bayern Munich and Aston Villa respectively, each for north of $22 million. The USMNT’s Brenden Aaronson and Ricardo Pepi, homegrown through MLS academies in Philadelphia and Dallas, were each transferred for north of $20 million in the last 18 months. Weston McKennie and Gio Reyna, too, played in FC Dallas and NYCFC youth systems before joining academies at Schalke 04 and Borussia Dortmund. Tyler Adams shot through the New York Red Bulls system, made his pro debut at 16 and was in Leipzig by 20.

“The future is getting 20-year-old top talent from Europe here,” Mukhtar says. “Someone at Real Madrid or Barcelona who doesn’t get the playing time, develop them, show, ‘This is a league where you can grow.'”

Someone like Everton midfielder Jack Harrison, who spent seven years in Manchester United’s youth academy before leaving for the United States. He won the Gatorade National Boys Soccer Player of the Year at Massachusetts’ Berkshire School, was a first-team All-American in his lone season at Wake Forest and was taken first in the 2016 MLS draft. He lit up MLS with NYCFC, was transferred to parent club Manchester City and came to prominence at Middlesbrough and Leeds United.

“MLS is at the best level it’s ever been at,” McCarty says. “Other than Messi, the biggest stars in our league – who could all play at big clubs in Europe but are here because the league’s improving – are in their prime: [Cincinnati’s] Luciano Acosta, [LAFC’s] Denis Bouanga, [Philadelphia’s] Daniel Gazdag and Hany.”

Other than Messi lingers, La Pulga never far from mind when talking MLS these days: the fanfare, the new eyes on the league, the 372 minutes of league play that earned an MVP nomination. But Mukhtar, Smith and McCarty think Messi and elder sages are still great for the league, just not for the conventional reasons.

“Messi, [Sergio] Busquets and [Jordi] Alba coming into the league is good, no doubt about it,” Mukhtar says. “They bring so much quality, younger players look up to them. We played Miami before these three came and after; the young players [around them] played on a completely different level.”

Smith, who came up through Fulham’s ranks and played most often for Wycombe Wanderers, says he’s never seen anything like MessiMania in football.

“He’s the greatest player that the planet’s ever seen,” Smith says. “Is it good for the league? Absolutely. Is he the same at 36 as he was at 26? Of course not. He’s not the same player as Hany, who’s all energy; he’s brief, intense bursts [now]. But his public attraction, the publicity, can’t be replaced. Is there anyone else in the world that can do that?”

When Mukhtar arrived, he was peppered about what playing in Europe was like. Now, he thinks players are rightly staying one or two years longer to develop in the U.S.

“You can’t really see how good the infrastructure of MLS is, how organized and professional everything is, unless you’re here,” Mukhtar says. “When people [overseas] talk about MLS, they talk about the gap from Player 1 to Player 18; I didn’t really think that way [when I arrived].”

At 24, Mukhtar’s arrived with a murky future. He’d captained Hertha BSC’s U-17s to a Bundesliga title and scored the lone goal in Germany’s 2014 U-19 European Championship victory before Benfica and Red Bull Salzburg didn’t go according to plan. When he caught on at Brondby, at 21, there was early interest from MLS with the Seattle Sounders. He still felt he had more to give in Europe. In 2019, when Nashville was still a USL side, he was on their list of potential Designated Players.

Mukhtar represented what Nashville wanted and what MLS had shifted toward in its stars: cornerstones looking to play their best years in the U.S. Mukhtar still dreams of Europe — “Everyone has that dream to play Champions League, it will never be easy to compete against that” — but when he could’ve moved, he not only didn’t but put roots further down in Nashville.

“I stopped saying things you can’t really promise, but I’m happy,” Mukhtar says. “Right now, Europe is not in front of me; playoffs is in front of me. That’s what I can influence right now and that’s what I want.”