Jack Elliott on rise from Sunday league to marking Rooney and Bale in MLS
Daniel Santos When Jack Elliott wheeled away in celebration towards the end of the 2022 MLS Cup final, he must have thought he had won the Philadelphia Union their first title.
It was the 123rd minute of an enthralling contest with LAFC, and when centre-back Elliott scores, Union usually win. So as he prodded the ball into an empty net, almost everyone in a near-stunned Banc of California Stadium (now BMO Stadium) thought Elliott had provided a dramatic conclusion.
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The stadium was virtually silent but for the 1,000 Union fans tucked away in a corner of the ground. LAFC earned the right to play the final on their patch due to having the league’s best regular season record, but Elliott’s close-range poke stunned the home crowd. “It just popped out a few yards and was an open goal,” says Elliott, speaking to The Athletic. “When you’re in that situation you’re making sure you don’t make an idiot of yourself and concentrate on putting it away. But from there, it just faded away.”
Six minutes later, and with a minute remaining of stoppage time at the end of extra time, Gareth Bale, so often the talisman throughout his career, rose above Elliott to level the game at 3-3 and take it to penalties. It turned out to be the final club goal of his career. Still deflated from the sucker punch, Union missed all three of their spot kicks and the trophy went to LAFC.
“It’s hard to come to terms with,” Elliott says. “It’s going to be on my mind, but you learn from things like that and we have to make sure that it doesn’t happen like that again.”
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The pain from that defeat brought an already tight-knit squad closer together and, led by last season’s MLS coach of the year Jim Curtin, they retained much of their roster from 2022. On Sunday, they kicked off their 2023 campaign with a 4-1 win over Columbus Crew.“We‘ve got a ton of competitions this year to try and win,” Elliott says. “Everyone’s on the same page and enjoys coming into training every day. It’s a good dressing room, a good culture. Everyone respects each other and that’s important to how we play and how successful we’ve been in the past two years.”
Last season, Union only conceded 26 goals, an MLS record over a 34-game campaign. That included 15 clean sheets, a club record (following on from 12 in each of the two seasons prior) — all with Elliott in the back line.
But for all the records, there was no silverware. As Elliott says, “We’ll go again.”
Elliott may fly under the radar — which seems bizarre considering his 6ft 6in (198cm) frame — but is firmly on the list of English-born players excelling abroad.
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Born in Surrey, just south of London, his childhood wasn’t spent within a professional academy setup (notwithstanding a year at Fulham aged 12 and a subsequent trial at Crystal Palace). Instead, he was playing school football, Sunday league with his older brother’s team and five-a-side at the local Powerleague. He was small and slight as a child, not that you’d believe it now, which he says actually aided his development.
“I wasn’t physical enough or big enough (at Fulham). I lasted a year and learned a few things like how to play against people who are bigger and stronger than me and it helps now,” he says. “I grew a foot in one summer when I was 15, so it was quite shocking when I came back from the holidays and everyone’s like, ‘What happened to you?!’. But it was important to the way I play now. I’m a fairly technical player and being smaller than everyone, you had to find a way to be able to really stamp your authority on the game in a way that’s not physically bullying people.”
By 17, Elliott may have thought the dream of making it in professional football was over. He was enjoying the level he was playing at and was preparing to study geography at university when one match on a cold evening in January 2013 changed his life’s trajectory.
He was playing for Old Wilsonians against Walton Casuals in the Surrey Premier Cup quarter-final, and although they lost in extra time, Elliott had impressed — not just in that game, but throughout the cup run. His team-mate, Dan Stratford, was a coach at West Virginia University and after the game, he and Marlon LeBlanc (now head coach of Philadelphia Union II), whom Stratford had invited to the game to watch Elliott, approached the defender about joining their scholarship programme.
Elliott didn’t give it a second thought.
The heat seared in the summer of 2013 in mountainous Morgantown, West Virginia. Elliott was early into his college experience and the attritional temperatures were a far cry from the leafy suburbs of London to which he was accustomed.
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“I was looking for my plane ticket home!” he laughs. Gruelling workouts — “the bane of my life” — in 35C (95F) heat were a brutal introduction to his freshman year, but they prepared him for what was to come.
Three years and 68 games later for the Mountaineers, he was eligible to attend the MLS combine in 2016. After an intense week of sprint, jump and agility tests and showcase matches, Elliott was selected by the Philadephia Union as the 77th overall pick in the 2017 MLS SuperDraft.
“I didn’t go there (to the USA) expecting to go pro, but as I went through college, I thought that I was doing well and I got a chance to go to the combine, which is a showcase for all the MLS clubs. During my final season, it started to become something that I thought was a real possibility.”
But the journey wasn’t done. “When you get drafted, you’ve got a glorified trial at that club,” he says. “Some people get the contract straight away but the majority of the time, they’re just picking you up and seeing what you’ve got, and then from there they may offer you a deal.”
Elliott was drafted alongside Aaron Jones, a defender who had spent 10 years at Ipswich Town. He now plays for King’s Lynn Town in the sixth tier of English football. But Elliott was heading for bigger heights and, at the end of his first campaign with Union, was nominated for MLS’ rookie of the year award after developing an excellent partnership with Auston Trusty, now on loan at second-tier Birmingham City from Arsenal.
“You never know where he is and everything he does is so clean that you can barely get close to him. I had to chop him down at the halfway line within half an hour because he was about to spin in our goal. But it was cool to start my career like that and that helped me believe I would be able to handle what could be thrown at me.”
Elliott is talking about marking David Villa on his MLS debut against New York City FC in 2017. It’s one of many big-name stars that Elliott has faced in the last few years, which reflects the growth of the league.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic (LA Galaxy) is another. He “didn’t say much on the pitch” but it was clear he “ruled the roost”. Elliott adds: “He’s impossible to hold up. And if he holds you up, you’ve got no chance to get around him.” Wayne Rooney, too, at DC United. The former England captain had reverted to the No 9 position and combined well with Luciano Acosta (now at Cincinnati) — “they were chalk and cheese”. “Everything Rooney does is clean and if the ball goes to him he doesn’t lose it,” Elliott says. “But again, a player that’s incredible and if he was given the time or the space he would punish you.”
Then there is Bale, who “when you get to extra time and you see him warming up (as he did in the MLS Cup final), you’re not going to be best pleased! But he’s incredible and showed that at World Cup too”. But the best player he’s faced? “Josef Martinez (Inter Miami, ex-Atlanta United). He’s a very good finisher and can run off your back or get in front of you and beat you. He’s a tough one to deal with.”
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The experiences against those elite-level players have helped mould the stalwart that leads Union’s defence today as one of MLS’ best centre-backs. Curtin is going into his 10th season as Union boss and Elliott hails that continuity as a big factor in Union’s recent successes. And though Curtin has total “control over the club”, he “lets the players play” and gives them responsibility, which in turn helps the players be accountable.
“We have quite a few players that have been around for years and a system that suits us,” he says. “That’s what leads to being up there with the best defences and the best attacks almost every year.
“The way we play really suits the players that we have. It’s high pressing and we get it forward as quickly as possible when we win it. If we lose it up there, we try to get it back as quickly as possible. Counter-attacking football sometimes gets looked down upon, but it helps us win games.
“That might oversimplify it but we have 11 players who are also good on the ball, which is extremely important. High pressing is one thing, but if you don’t have the players that can do anything with the ball after that — you can’t press for 90 minutes every game, especially during the summer — you’ll struggle.”
As well as fighting for silverware with Union, Elliott has personal ambitions. He is English-born to Scottish parents and he doesn’t hesitate when asked about his international ambitions.
“Scotland would be a dream for me,” he says. “I’ve been brought up that way and it would be something amazing (to get a cap). There have been rumours here and there, but nothing concrete, so hopefully I’ll get a chance at some point, but I’ll just keep working and see where that goes.”
(Top photo: Omar Vega/Getty Images)
