SAN JOSE, Calif. – It’s easy to call Marc Pelosi the new kid on the block for the San Jose Earthquakes.
Easy, and wrong.
True, Pelosi has never suited up for his hometown MLS club, and yes, there has been no deal announced between the league and the 21-year-old, who was released by Liverpool last month. But there are some tea leaves to read.
For one thing, Pelosi has been practicing with San Jose for the past few weeks. For another, the Quakes are first on the MLS Allocation List. Topping it all off, the former Sunnyvale wunderkind – a US youth international for the better part of a decade – is one of the 24 players subject to that method of acquisition.
So if a deal is struck to bring Pelosi to MLS, it would likely reunite him with the pro club where he first cut his teeth as a teenage guest, playing alongside the likes of then-unheralded Chris Wondolowski.
“Since I was 14, I’ve been training with the [first] team here,” Pelosi told MLSsoccer.com this week. “It’s funny; I’ve seen everyone come and go. They think I’m new, I’m like, ‘No, I’ve been here...' I remember Shea [Salinas] from a few years because he was here. Wondo. [David] Bingham was here for a bit before Jon Busch was the ‘keeper. I was friends with him. It was basically a whole different squad when I trained here five years ago.”
One of Pelosi’s earliest memories of working with the Quakes involved former Jamaican international Ryan Johnson, who scored a team-high 16 goals over San Jose’s first two seasons after returning as an expansion club in 2008. During a training session at West Valley College, Pelosi collided with Johnson, a powerful forward listed at 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds during his MLS days.
“I knocked him on his [backside], and I was like, ‘Don’t touch me, I’m 14,’” Pelosi said. “That was really funny. So it’s really cool just to be here now, training with them. We’ll see what happens.”
Quakes coach Dominic Kinnear confirmed that the club is chasing after Pelosi, a natural left-footer who could fit in at a number of different spots for San Jose. Signing Pelosi would continue the Quakes’ nascent youth movement, coming in the wake of inking 19-year-old Tommy Thompson as their first-ever Homegrown player last year and picking up on Wednesday Matheus Martins Silva, a Brazilian-born 18-year-old who had been committed to Saint Louis University.
Pelosi’s career at Liverpool stalled after he suffered a broken leg with the Reds’ U-21 team in February 2013. It took nearly 14 months for the leg to heal, by which point he had fallen behind in the extraordinarily competitive world of the English Premier League.
The situation illustrated one of the biggest potential pitfalls facing young US players aspiring to jump straight to elite European clubs. Just getting signed by a team such as Liverpool – which snapped up Pelosi as a 17-year-old in 2011 – is only a partial victory.
“It’s a long way to go,” Pelosi said. “It’s a big step to get there first, but then there’s another big step. I think it’s only halfway when you get to the club, because the hardest part is probably breaking in, especially at a team like Liverpool…. I was doing really well, and I saw myself to get a chance with the first team, but then – I don’t want to blame it on injuries, but that just hindered me a little bit. I was coming back, but 18 months is a long time.”
Pelosi had a successful stint with the US Under-23 team that finished third in the Toulon Tournament last month, appearing in four of five matches (with three starts) and playing alongside Quakes midfielder Fatai Alashe.
“At the beginning, it was difficult,” Pelosi said of his comeback. “You always get a small injury here or there. For eight months, I haven’t really had even one injury. I’ve been playing games, I was with the 23s in France, played a lot of games, got my game fitness up and now I’ve been training a lot. The Quakes had a good level, so I think my fitness is really good at the moment.”
Pelosi said he had explored options in England and Germany – where he was born and speaks the language – but that while Europe was enticing as a temporary destination, it wasn’t the same as being home.
“You could see guys even on the first team at Liverpool talking about it; ‘Oh, I want to play in the US,’” Pelosi said. “I just love being here.”
