Yunus's American Dream

Good things are happening to Yunus Musah in 2020. At 17 he has made his debut in the First Division with Valencia, becoming one of Javi Gracia's fixtures in the line-ups (he has played in eight of the nine days; in seven as a starter), and he has also done so with the United States National Team. Yunus debuted this Thursday (and as a starter) in the friendly against Wales, thus giving the first step to choose to be international with the American country and not with England, combined in which he has played up to the Sub'18 category.

Yunus Musah has a history that is as peculiar as his arrival at Valencia is being explosive. Yunus, of Ghanaian origin, was born in New York by chance. He has never lived in the United States. Yunus, the youngest of three siblings, came into the world during a visit by his parents to relatives who reside in the Big Apple and whom they go to see relatively frequently. But Yunus He grew up in Italy and established himself as a footballer in England, country where he arrived at the age of ten to join the Arsenal Academy.

Yunus, who has a British passport (he has become the first footballer from the United Kingdom to debut with Valencia), was burning stages in the lower categories of England until he decided to accept Pablo Longoria's proposal to try his luck in Spain. Specifically in Valencia. And it was precisely after his arrival in Paterna that the call from the United States began to take shape.

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Nico Estévez crosses his path … and in England

Yunus's personal and sporting history ran in time parallel to that of Nico Estevez, a young Valencian coach, who came to coach Valencia temporarily when Pizzi arrived after Djukic's dismissal, and who is currently Gregg Berhalter's assistant in the United States National Team. Nico Estévez left in 2014 “to make the Americas”. Columbus signed him as director of their Academy. Precisely there he worked Gregg Berhalter, with whom he laid the foundations of a “quarry structure according to European clubs” and who called him to be one of his assistants in the first team.

The United States recruited Berhalter as their coach in 2019 and with him went Nico Estévez. Coincidentally the same year that Yunus Musah arrived at Valencia. How do the two stories intersect? “I am from Valencia and a friend, Rubén Mora -who was coach of the Valencia school-, told me that they had signed a very good boy from Arsenal who was born in the United States”, Estévez comments. “From there I began to investigate, I saw him in Youth League matches with Valencia and I gave Berhalter videos,” he recalls before emphasizing: “We have no doubt that we had to try to convince him to play for the United States” . Said and done.

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Nico Estévez got in touch with Yunus Musah, his parents and his brother Abdul in late 2019. “We talked about the project and I noticed him receptive because he has a close bond with his family in New York, but we did not want to force him to do anything, just tell him about the option and study it; the pandemic left us without competing and we did not speak again until this summer , when I saw him play in preseason and I proposed to him to go to a call, he accepted and here he is, “he says.

At the moment Yunus Musah is testing what decision to make. The United States will not play official matches until 2021 and it will be then when the Valencian player has to decide whether to definitively renounce England to join the Americans for life. The project that Berhalter and Estévez present him is tempting; Of which they are part, among others, Pulisic (Chelsea), Giovanni Reyna (Borussia), Timoty Weah (Lille) or Dest (Barcelona). In October, Dest made the decision that Yunus has yet to confirm: to swear eternal love to the United States.

The American team is building a team of talented young people (in this call there are 14 players under 20 years old) and has challenges ahead of him in the next two years: “We will play the semifinals of the Concacaf Nations League against Honduras and we hope that we will also play the final; we have the Tokyo Olympics and the qualifying phase for the Qatar World Cup; we are giving steps to be in soccer what the United States always wants to be: a world reference “, emphasizes Nico Estévez. And for this they have Yunus Musah, a boy whose life is changing in this atypical 2020.