Every team needs a Lennard Maloney. A player who never flinches, runs the hard yards, and does the things nobody else wants to do (or thinks they’re better than).
It’s not just that Maloney is prepared to work harder than everyone else. He loves it.
The 24-year-old is the toiling poster boy for the type of underdog success story — both individual and collective — in which German football still seems to specialise.
His club, Heidenheim, are enjoying their first season in the Bundesliga after clinching promotion in dramatic fashion last year. A little over 20 years ago, Heidenheim were a semi-professional outfit in the fifth tier, based in a small town that trains from major German cities do not pass directly through.
They had only the ninth-largest wage bill in the second division and now have comfortably the lowest in the top flight.
Yet Heidenheim sit comfortably mid-table and two weeks ago beat Champions League semi-finalists Bayern Munich 3-2 at their home ground, the Voith-Arena.
Manager Frank Schmidt is the long-serving author of this success story and the veteran has been able to rely on players who put the team before all else: a trait epitomised by their newly-minted U.S. men’s national team midfielder.
“Every team should have the one who does the dirty work,” says Maloney. “I’m the one who does the dirty work.”
In October, Maloney made history for Heidenheim when he became their first player to become a senior international. It caused excitement and pride at the club, but none more so than for Maloney.
Maloney’s father Martin was an American airman who met his mother Sandy when he was stationed in Kenya where she was an air stewardess. The couple moved to her native Germany shortly before Lennard was born in Berlin. Their son has always felt pride at his American citizenship but could scarcely believe it when the call-up came last year.
“I was visiting my girlfriend and had a call from the club saying the manager from the national team had been trying to contact me,” he says. “They gave him my number and on the drive back home — it was a four-hour drive — I got a message and it was from Gregg (Berhalter) saying he wanted to talk to me.
“The whole way home I was going really slow in the right lane thinking, ‘When’s he going to call?’.
“Eventually he did and explained his ideas for me and said that he would invite me to the national camp. I hung up and needed to pull over and rest for half an hour. You’re 24 and you’re about to go to the national team. It’s what you dream about when you’re little. I was emotional.”
Folarin Balogun and Maloney battle in USMNT training in November (John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
The USMNT coach had seen the same evidence as Maloney’s opponents in Germany: this was a player who could put the dog in the U.S. “bulldog spirit” ethos.
He is seventh in the table of Bundesliga players with the most high-intensity runs this season so far (2,182). Maloney has also covered 307.7km (191 miles) in league games from a strict defensive midfield role (only 12 players have run further).
It is reflective of his humble and uncomplicated approach to his role in the team. A centre-back earlier in his career, Maloney came through Union Berlin’s youth system without securing a place in the senior side before moving to Borussia Dortmund 2, where he stocked up on experience if not game-time for the first team.
After joining Heidenheim on a free transfer in 2022, Schmidt repurposed the youngster into a defensive midfielder.
“I was always the guy who ran a lot and tried to cover space and that’s my game,” Maloney explains. “But the manager knows what you can do and how you can improve and find the right mixture.
“At first I thought, ‘OK, I’ll cover the space for you but you don’t have to give me the ball’, but he knew that I needed to be pushed up and get those balls, even if I was just blocking or clearing them — then later getting it and keeping it. That helped me evolve pretty well into the defensive midfield position.
“I think nowadays it’s important you’re flexible. You’re more valuable if the coach knows he can put you in different roles.
“I’m not the type of player who comes through just on talent. I had to work for a lot of the things I’ve achieved now.”
Maloney is taking nothing for granted in his first season of top-flight football, especially since he remembers the suffering required to get there. A head injury in the final game of last season, when Heidenheim came back to beat relegated Regensburg 3-2 deep in added time, meant Maloney had to watch the nerve-shredding finale from the dug-out.
“I couldn’t watch a game like that from the bench again,” he says. “Either I’m on the pitch or I’m not there at all. I felt awful — hot, cold, the nerves… then the whistle went and we knew we were promoted. Everyone ran onto the pitch and hugged each other and I just sat there crying. It dawns on you what just happened.
“During the season you chat to people at the club: the goalie coach or people who work at the stadium, and they were here when the club was still in the eighth tier. You already know what the club means to you and then you realise how much it means to them, so to give them that moment gives you so much more satisfaction.”
Maloney gets to grips with Leverkusen’s Patrik Schick (Marcel Engelbrecht – firo sportphoto/Getty Images)
It was the early hours of the following morning when the team coach pulled back into Heidenheim to be greeted by thousands of fans. “It was late when we got back, but Heidenheim wasn’t dark at all,” he recalls. “A lot of people were buying us drinks. You’d finish one and get a new one straight away.”
This season, they have drawn at Dortmund, defeated high-flying Stuttgart and beaten Bayern at home, but Maloney is honest about the step up in quality.
“It is not just how quickly they move the ball but how fast everyone else is in the head,” he says. “Just like set pieces; you start to get information and they already know what they want to do. They look at us and how we stand and they find the right way to play against it, so it was something we had to adjust to and we did quickly.”
Heidenheim are strong from set pieces and counter-attacks, with Schmidt giving each player a specialist role in both boxes.
“I can’t go into detail because I don’t want to expose too much, but we know what we’re capable of,” says Maloney. “We’re a team that can handle the ball, but at set pieces against big clubs, that’s our time to shine.
“In practice, we spend 15 minutes, but highly concentrated, going through variations of how we want to play them and tailored to our next opponent, considering maybe where the weaknesses are and how they defend corners. It’s very detailed.
“We try to adjust and with Nikky (German winger Jan-Niklas Beste) we have someone who can deliver them so well.”
If some opponents were inclined to underestimate Heidenheim at first, it is unlikely to last.
“We have a special bond in this team and we work together in one direction,” he says. “Doing that we can beat anybody.
“We’re good, but if you compare ourselves to bigger clubs, they have better players. It’s knowing what we can do together though. Then we’re unstoppable.”
Maloney was forced off in his side’s 2-1 home defeat by RB Leipzig on Saturday, suffering a dislocated shoulder in an awkward fall, but he believes bigger tests will lie ahead next term should they, as expected, remain in the Bundesliga (Heidenheim are 10th and seven points ahead of 16th-placed Bochum in the relegation play-off spot).
“You have to remember where you came from,” he says. “We’ve worked for this and if we stay in the Bundesliga, we have to work even harder next year because everyone knows us and can adjust to us. Next season will really show if we’re capable.”
If selected, this summer’s Copa America will also be a chance for Maloney to show he is capable of living his dream. He covets a role in a hotly competitive position on the field for the national team and, having had a taste of it, his appetite is considerable.
“It was just pure excitement,” he recalls of his 25-minute debut in the 4-0 friendly win over Ghana last October. “My family from the U.S. went and I know my family back home got U.S. channels that worked so they could watch. It’s that thought, you know, ‘You’re about to play for a whole country’.
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“I’d have been happy even if I didn’t get on the pitch, but he subbed me on against Ghana and on the flight back I was thinking that I had just worn the shirt for a whole country.”
He was an unused substitute in the 3-0 Nations League win over Trinidad and Tobago and came on in the 2-1 quarter-final defeat that saw the U.S. advance on aggregate, but he has not been selected since — in part due to an injury that coincided with March’s CONCACAF Nations League fixtures. Maloney knows what he has to do.
(John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
“I need to work on my game with the ball, but that bulldog spirit should be a base,” he says. “I live it.”
It is little surprise that Berhalter was glowing when asked what attracted him to Maloney in October. “How he plays the game with really a lot of emotion, with a lot of passion,” said the USMNT boss. “You see him clapping for his team-mates, you see him going into tackles, a really committed player.”
Given that profile, it is equally unsurprising that Maloney, a boyhood follower of Arsenal, looks up to former Arsenal and current Bayer Leverkusen player star Granit Xhaka.
“When I got a sense for how soccer really works, I admired Xhaka a lot,” he says. “I loved how he was aggressive but then really fine with the ball, too. It’s something I still admire. When we played against Leverkusen, that was one game when I was looking at him and thinking, ‘Damn, you’re actually playing against him’.”
Like Xhaka, he wears his heart on his sleeve and would at the very least represent a cost-efficient call-up for the USMNT World Cup roster for 2026.
“When I was smaller I watched the World Cup all the time, so to aim to be at one, yeah, the possibility to be part of it is crazy,” he says. “If it doesn’t happen then I’m just proud to be part of it and I’ll support them anyway.
“But if they call me up, they won’t have to get me a plane ticket to the U.S. — I will just run there.”
With that, Maloney has to go. A tough training session only ended 45 minutes ago, but he is headed to the gym for another workout.
“There’s always something to do,” he smiles. “No days off!”
(Top photo: Neil Baynes/Getty Images)
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