F365 interview: MLS’s giant Englishman Jack Elliott with Scottish ambitions

Ryan Baldi
Jack Elliott of Philadelphia Union
Jack Elliott of Philadelphia Union

The only British player to have made more MLS appearances than Jack Elliott is New York Red Bulls legend Bradley Wright-Phillips.

The towering Philadelphia Union centre-back will cross the 200-game threshold within a matter of weeks and will likely overtake the son of Arsenal icon Ian Wright as the league’s most-experienced Brit by the early part of next season.

Unlike most of the other European players to have plied their trade in US soccer’s top division, Elliott is no David Beckham-esque late-career import. Nor is he, like Wright-Phillips was, a player who moved Stateside mid-prime to find a level of success that had alluded him on the other side of the Atlantic.

No, Elliott’s path to a long and storied MLS career is as American as a pickup-truck-driving, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing, Star Spangled Banner-singing apple pie.

The 6ft 6ins centre-back had been released by Fulham’s academy as a kid for being too small. With no further interest from professional clubs, he played local Sunday league football and on Saturdays, from the age of 14, he’d turn out for a men’s team made up of alumni from his school.

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“The team that I was playing for when I got scouted was the ‘old boys’ team, playing in the Surrey Premier Cup,” Elliott tells Football365. “The head coach at West Virginia University, Dan Stratford, we went to the same school, so he was part of the alumni and he came back for Christmas to play in the games. He was playing in one them and thought I looked half-decent. He took a chance on me to try and come out there.

“I didn’t really think too hard about it. He called me after the game we’d played in together and I was biting his hand off for the opportunity. I talked to my mum about it and she said, ‘Yeah, you should go for it.’ That was basically it.”

So Elliott spent four years playing college soccer for the West Virginia Mountaineers while studying for a degree in business management information systems. The student-athlete life was a foreign concept to an aspiring footballer who’d grown up in London. Melding academic demands and a busy training regimen was not easy.

“It’s tough,” he says. “You’d train to the same sort of schedule as a professional team, but then you have to get to all your lectures and make sure you do well in all your classes. It’s a big balance to try and work all that together. The colleges are usually pretty accommodating when you have to miss classes, but it is a lot of mental effort to keep up on the academics and trying to play your best at a fairly high level.

“MLS was my major goal. I didn’t always think that it was going to go that way. But I got the opportunity and I took it.”

That opportunity came via the 2017 MLS SuperDraft. The draft process, like college sport as an avenue to the top professional level, is another staple of America sports alien to overseas equivalents. Each year, every MLS team takes turns to pick players from a pool of the nation’s best up-and-coming talent, with the previous season’s worst-ranked side picking first and the champions selecting last.

The players have no influence over where they will end up; they’re lucky if they’re even given a hint about their destination during the pre-draft process.

“It’s interesting, the way it happens,” Elliott says. “You have the combine, where the coaches and staff from the teams get together and they select about 80 players to play a few games over a weekend so they can have a look at them. The players that are involved in the draft meet the teams and do interviews that can indicate who’s interested. You have an inkling but not a definite notion of where you’re going.”

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Elliott’s name was called in the fourth round of the draft, chosen by the Philadelphia Union with the 77th overall pick. He was actually the second English-born defender the Union had taken that year, with Aaron Jones, who currently plays for Aldershot Town, selected 33rd.

Jones never made a senior appearance for Philadelphia, but Elliott was quickly thrown into the fray. His first home start was something of a baptism of fire, too, pitting him against Spain legend David Villa as New York City FC visited Subaru Park.

“It was a shellshock playing against a guy like that who’d done so much in his career and was a very good player,” Elliott says. “Fairly early on, he spun me. I got out of position and I had to chop him down at the halfway line. I think that sort of thing was a good learning curve to jump right into it.”

And Elliott was evidently a fast learner. He quickly established himself as a regular starter and ended his first MLS campaign by coming third in the voting for the Rookie of the Year award.

“It was something that I was always ready for,” Elliot says of his adaptation to MLS. “Being able to match the pace of the game mentally was the main thing for me. I’m not the fastest physically, but I think I can read the game fairly well. That helps in the league and in football in general. The mentality of winning every day and trying to stay in the team and help the team grow, that’s what we did.”

In his fourth season, Elliott helped Philadelphia claim a first-ever trophy, winning the Supporters’ Shield for finishing the MLS regular season with the best record. With the triumph coming in the midst of Covid and thus with limited numbers of fans able to attend games, he admits the Union’s success that season felt “different”.

“But it still meant a lot to us,” he insists. “It was a huge milestone for the club and a great achievement for all of us. The Shield is the pinnacle of who’s had the best season.”

Two years later, the Union had a shot at glory in front of 22,384 fans – albeit mostly supporting the opposition – at Banc of California Stadium in Los Angeles. Up against LAFC in the MLS Cup final, Elliott could hardly have shouldered a greater workload; as well as having to defend against the likes of Carlos Vela, Denis Bouanga and Gareth Bale, he also scored two goals in a 3-3 draw that ended with the Union losing on penalties.

“That was a busy day for me,” he laughs. “It was certainly a day of highs and lows. It was another thing to learn from for us and hopefully we’ll get another chance this year to get back and do it again. It was a good experience for all the team. To be involved in a setting like that, you’d like it to go different and come away with the trophy, but it doesn’t always go like that.

“Dealing with the pressure of a game like that is the positive to take from it. The way we fought all the way through that season and into that game, taking it to them in their stadium, with 90 per cent their fans, it showed a team with no stars can take it to anyone.”

The task for star-less sides isn’t getting any easier, though. Now a veteran of the league, Elliott has seen – and experienced – first-hand how a steady influx of attacking superstars has raised the level of play across MLS and made a defender’s life harder.

“The attacking talent and the talent overall in the league has improved dramatically over the past five years,” Elliott says. “It’s not just the big names that everyone is talking about that bring that – [Lionel] Messi, [Luis] Suarez. Every team has one or two players now who are extremely dynamic and can do something in any point of a game. There’s always someone you have to be extra aware of. Every team has a player that has done a lot in their career and is now making MLS competitive.

“It’s not a place now where players like that come and take it easy. I don’t think you can do that anymore. Maybe 10 years ago that was possible. But week in and week out, you can’t come and take it easy. If you do, you’ll get found out because the threshold of talent is much higher.”

One upside of the rising tide of talent is the growing global interest in MLS. New York Red Bulls forward Lewis Morgan recently earned a place in Scotland’s Euro 2024 squad, his first call-up in six years, off the back of a run of outstanding form in the States. Elliott, who is uncapped at any international level, remains hopeful that he might yet get the chance to represent the nation of his parents’ birth.

“It’s been my dream since I was a kid to play for Scotland,” he says. “There are a few Scots in the league who are doing really well – Ryan Gauld at Vancouver, Johnny Russell has been really good for Kansas over the years. Hopefully [Morgan’s call-up] gives more of us a chance as well.

“That’s still on my radar and it’s something that hopefully could happen in the future. Hopefully my performances can catch the eye of someone there.”

If Scotland manager Steve Clarke is looking at MLS, Elliott shouldn’t be difficult to spot. He wears navy blue and gold, he’s extremely tall and, if you look closely, you can still just about see David Villa poking out of his pocket.