Analysis: It’s Bongi, for short, but there’s a long list of reasons Minnesota United loves him

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

When Bongokuhle Hlongwane first arrived at Minnesota United, most of us just wondered how to pronounce the South African attacker’s name.

Nearly three seasons later, Minnesota fans have grown accustomed to the pronunciation; for the record, the team’s media guide lists it as “Bong-go-HOOK-leh Hluh-ONG-wah-neh, but most just call him “Bongi”. As the Loons enter Wednesday’s game at Real Salt Lake, though, there are now other topics to consider.

For example: how is it possible that Hlongwane has become MNUFC’s second-leading scorer in the MLS era, only one goal behind Robin Lod — but with so little fanfare?

The South African scored 17 goals in 2023, but it flew under the radar, since only eight of them came in MLS play. Hlongwane added two in the U.S. Open Cup, and an astonishing seven in five Leagues Cup games, setting the MLS-era club record for goals in a season across all competitions.

Over the span of the 2024 season, he’s been the one to carry the Loons’ goal-scoring. It’s Hlongwane, not any of the team’s well-known strikers, who leads the squad with 11 goals. He’s only the second Loon to score double-digit goals in consecutive years, after Darwin Quintero from 2018-19 — and he helped carry the squad all summer, when Minnesota was struggling to find 11 healthy players to put on the field.

“In that middle period, we were far too reliant on him and Sang Bin [Jeong] for counterattacks,” manager Eric Ramsay said. “I think when we’ve been better recently, he’s looked more complete, as a consequence of that.”

This despite another question about Hlongwane: what position is he even playing these days? Defensively speaking, the past two weeks he’s lined up as a right wingback, a position that’s become — for the Loons, at least — the chore on the chore chart that nobody wants to check off. But offensively speaking, he’s positioned more where you’d expect a right winger to play — and he’s even finished games playing as a traditional center-forward.

“He’s not playing sort of somewhere between a wingback and a winger because I necessarily think it’s his best position,” Ramsay said. “Obviously it’s an area where we haven’t found loads of consistency. We don’t have a very clean-cut, obvious solution on that side, but I think he’s played it really, really well. So it’s a nice problem for us to have in some senses — but in some senses a touch frustrating, in that we end up using him probably in a slightly sort of suboptimal way.”

And then there’s the question that everyone, even Hlongwane, struggles to answer: why does he, more than any other player, radiate joy?

Bongi appears to be having the time of his life on an almost daily basis. It’s impossible for any player to look entirely serious when their job involves kicking a ball for a living, but Bongi looks genuinely joyful, more than any other Loon. He’s the first to be randomly dancing while warming up for training, the first to celebrate wildly with his teammates when he wins a mini-game, the most likely to be singing at any point during practice.

“This is where I get my space, I have to clear my mind, and I get to enjoy myself,” Hlongwane said. “Even if I’m not doing well, I know if I get here, this is where I get to be with the guys.”

Maybe the thing that can explain everything is when Hlongwane tries to sum things up, to explain why he’s enjoying himself so much, why he’s scoring when nobody else is, and why he’s happy to chip in at right wingback.

His answer is almost like a mantra, and maybe it’s the one answer to all the questions. “If I do it with love,” he said, “then it’s easy to do it.”