Mkhitaryan: My story

Writing on The Players’ Tribune, Henrik Mkhitaryan opens up about his emotional journey from Armenia to Manchester United.

One of my earliest memories is begging my father, Hamlet, to take me to training with his football club in France.

I was maybe five years old. In the ’80s, before I was born, my dad played in the old Soviet Top League in our home country of Armenia. He was a small but very quick striker. Soviet Soldier magazine actually honoured him with its “Knight of Attack” award in 1984.

In 1989, when I was just a baby, we moved to France because of some conflicts that were brewing in Armenia. My father played five years for Valence in France’s second division. I’d always cry when he would leave for training. Every morning I’d say, “Dad, take me with you. Please, please take me with you!”

At that age, I didn’t really care about the football yet, I just wanted to be with my father. But he didn’t want to be distracted during training by worrying about me running off, so he came up with a clever plan to fool me.

One morning, I said, “Dad, take me to training.”

He said, “No, no. There’s no training today, Henrikh. I’m going to the supermarket. I’ll be right back.”

He escaped to training, and I waited … and waited.

He came back home after a few hours. No grocery bags.

I lost it. I started crying.

“You lied to me! You didn’t go to the supermarket! You went to play football!”

My time with my father would be very meaningful, but also very short. 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 tumour. 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 team-mates.

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 Zidane, Kaká and Hamlet. (Pretty good company for my father).

It was very difficult, because my mother had to be both a mother and a father to me. It’s very hard for a mother to do this in society. She had to stick up for me, and also sometimes be hard with me like a father would be. I had days when I was coming home from training saying, “ah, it’s so hard. I want to quit”.

And my mother would say, “you don’t quit. You have to keep working, and it will get better tomorrow”.

After my father’s death, my mother had to take a job to support our family. So she started working for the Armenian football federation.

This became quite funny actually once I started playing for the Armenian youth national team. If I would get emotional and act up on the pitch, my mother would come to me after the match and say, “Henrikh! What are you doing? You must behave or I’m going to have trouble at work!”

I’d say, “But mum, they kicked me! They….”

“No, no, no. You must always be polite!”

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 …

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