Henrikh Mkhitaryan is finally getting the chance to showcase his talent at Manchester United.
The Armenian forward endured a difficult few months at Old Trafford upon arriving from Borussia Dortmund for £27m last summer.
Mkhitaryan suffered an injury on international duty in September, was substituted at half-time against Manchester City and was out of the first-team as Jose Mourinho appeared to doubt his suitability for the Premier League
However, that testing period is nothing compared to what Mkhitaryan came through growing-up. The 27-year-old has opened up on his unique backstory in an article for The Players’ Tribune, the tragic passing of his father and his experience of playing in Brazil as a teenager.
Mkhitaryan’s father Hamlet died of cancer when he was just 33 years old. Hamlet was diagnosed while playing for ASOA Valence in France, and the striker’s family moved back to their native Armenia.
The United forward was just seven-years-old when his father passed away in May 1996, but cites him as his inspiration, recounting how he would study video recordings of his father’s matches.
“My time with my father would be very meaningful, but also very short,” Mkhitaryan writes.
“When I was six years old, my parents told me that we were moving back home to Armenia. I didn’t really understand what was happening. My father had stopped playing football, and he was at home all the time.
“I didn’t know it, but my father had a brain tumor. Everything happened very fast. Within a year, he was gone. Because I was so young, I didn’t completely understand the concept of death.
“I remember seeing my mother and older sister always crying, and I would ask them, ‘Where is my father?’ No one could explain what was going on. Day by day, they started to tell to me what had happened. I remember my mother saying, ‘Henrikh, he will never be with us’. And I thought, Never? Never is such a long time when you are seven years old.
“We had a lot of videotapes of him playing in France, and I would watch them very often to remember him. Two, three times a week I would watch his matches, and it would give me a lot of happiness, especially when the camera showed him when he was celebrating a goal or hugging his teammates.
“On those videotapes, my father lived on. The year after my father died, I started football training. He was the drive for me, he was my idol. I said to myself, I have to run just like him. I have to shoot just like him.
“By the time I was 10 years old, my entire life was football. Training, reading, watching, even playing football on PlayStation. I was totally focused on it. I especially loved the creative players — the maestros. I always wanted to play like (Zinedine) Zidane, Kaká and Hamlet. (Pretty good company for my father.)”
Mkhitaryan also spoke about his time playing football in Brazil as a teenager, the skills he developed and how the experience of learning a new language helped him prepare for a nomadic career that has seen him play in Ukraine, Germany and England.
“As tough as it was for us with my father gone, my mother and sister were always pushing me. They even let me go to Brazil by myself when I was 13 to train with São Paulo for four months. That was one of the most interesting times of my life, because I was a very shy kid from Armenia who didn’t speak any Portuguese. But I didn’t care at all because, to me, I was getting to go to football paradise.
I dreamed of being like Kaká, and Brazil was the home of that creative style, which the Brazilians call ginga. I actually studied the Portuguese language for two months before I left, but when I arrived in São Paulo I quickly found out that it’s one thing to study, but it’s another thing to speak with the people.
“Thankfully, everybody spoke the universal language of football. We became friends by communicating through creativity on the pitch. I remember I scored a few goals in training one day, and I thought, ‘Wow, I am an Armenian kid scoring goals in Brazil.’ It made me feel like a star.
“Then, when I was 20, I moved to Metalurh Donetsk in Ukraine, and I added a bit of Ukrainian and Russian to the mix. It was really funny because two years later when I moved across town to Shakhtar Donetsk, many people said it was going to be very difficult for me. They said I would not be able to succeed there, because there were 12 Brazilian players at the club.
“I didn’t say anything, I just laughed to myself. In my mind, I’m thinking, I’m half Brazilian. Of course, I got on great with my teammates, and my three years at Shakhtar were brilliant.”
Mkhitaryan would join Borussia Dortmund from Shakhtar in 2013, and his stunning form earned him a move to United last summer.
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