The Irish duo seeking MLS glory with Atlanta United 

Irish duo Jake Mulraney and Jon Gallagher are integral figures for MLS side Atlanta United

Atlanta United midfielder Jake Mulraney 23 left United forward Jon Gallagher chat during the first half of the match against FC Dallas at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia last month. After a spell of five months without a game, the pair have had a ‘crazy’ run of eight games in 30 days. Picture: Jacob Gonzalez/Atlanta United

When they look out the window of their apartments in northwest Atlanta, it's the soaring, red brick walls of the Atlanta Braves' baseball ground that dominates the horizon for Jake Mulraney and Jon Gallagher.

It's a view the pair have grown increasingly familiar with this year, as they pass into the seventh month of life under coronavirus in the southern US state of Georgia.

The pair, from Dublin and Dundalk respectively, play for Atlanta United, arguably the most popular franchise in Major League Soccer, and in their own words this is a debut season to file under the 'surreal' category.

Mulraney joined from Scottish side Hearts in January and made his league debut in March, just one week before lockdown shuttered stadiums all over the country. Gallagher returned to America from Aberdeen a month later after his loan spell ended, and has yet to hear the cheer of a single fan.

A crowd of 69,301 squeezed into Atlanta's space-age Mercedes Benz Stadium to see Mulraney's home debut against Cincinnati in early March, but it was more than five months before he'd next lace up his boots in a competitive game, followed by a “crazy” run of eight games in 30 days.

Gallagher made a belated debut in July's 'MLS is back' pre-season tournament, only for manager Frank De Boer to announce his 'mutual' departure two days later. Surreal indeed.

“It's been different,” Gallagher laughs on a group Zoom call, as he shoos away his pet dog, feverishly pawing at him.

“It was weird how the debut went. I was plugging away, waiting for my chance because I knew I had come back from my loan a better player, but I was still waiting. Frank said how impressed he was in the game, then a few days later he was gone. I just thought 'here we go again', but luckily Stephen Glass came in and we'd worked together before with the second team and he knew what I can do.” 

Three goals have come in six starts since, with Gallagher joining Mulraney as a regular under the Scottish interim head coach.

Tonight the Atlanta Falcons will welcome a handful of fans to their NFL game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and later this month, Gallagher will hope to get his first taste of 'normal' football, when the city's soccer fans are allowed to enter the stunning venue.

“The stadium is incredible. It's mad, it's unreal,” Mulraney said. “The noise of it is crazy. Celtic Park is deafening but this is different altogether, especially the train horn noise they play when we score, your head can be in bits. The pictures don't do it justice,” Gallagher adds, “when you see it from the outside, it looks like a big alien spaceship. I've only been in the stands when it's full, and when I scored my first goal I got the horn noise but there were no fans. It sums up 2020.” 

It is likely to be 2021, at least, before the pair run out in front of a sold-out stadium, but the very fact that there is such an opportunity is remarkable in itself.

Only last September, the pair came up against each other when Hearts hosted Aberdeen in the Scottish Premiership.

“The weirder thing is we were marking each other!” Gallagher said. “He was on the left and I was on the right.” 

Gallagher's route to Scotland was an unusual one, with teenage trials at Juventus, Marseille and Blackburn coming to nothing, with most clubs gently telling him he was not built to play at the top level.

Instead of throwing in the towel at 18, he punted for the US Collegiate route, and two successful years later he was snapped up by MLS.

“I wasn't ready for next level, physically, but I grew another inch or two in college and you see that and think of how many players at 18, like me, aren't ready but never appear again. I was given a lifeline at 20/21 and I was ready then to make that jump.

“I thought it might not be so good at college level, but it was very physical and athletic and you get lots of guys who were released from academies. It's a good standard and a good foundation.” 

Aberdeen offered a trial just before Gallagher was drafted by MLS, and a year later they returned after the player had struggled to make it into DeBoer's starting XI.

“They wanted me for six months and I jumped at it immediately,” he said. “I needed to get out and get important games at a high level before I fell off a cliff.

A year before that I'd have said you were mad if I'd be playing games against Celtic, and scoring against Rangers. It was amazing.

Mulraney's route to Scotland was a little less circuitous, but the same drive to improve pushed him to leave his comfortable surroundings for something a little more challenging.

“Definitely the main thing is playing games,” he said. “I was at QPR and coming to end of my contract when I was sent on loan at Stevenage.

“Les Ferdinand, the academy director, came to my final game there and left a contract for me, but it wasn't serious so I just said to myself I need to get out and play men's football.

“Inverness was probably the best of what came out and I jumped at it. I did alright and then went to Hearts, which was a bit of a jump, considering the size of the club.

“The main thing was getting games and I got maybe over a hundred. You can't get much bigger than playing in Celtic Park or Ibrox and I played in a Cup Final against Celtic too. It was an unreal experience, because I'd never played in a game like that before. We got an early goal, though, and that's never good against Celtic.” 

Now the pair are on the same side in Atlanta, and live just a few apartments apart, within the same complex. Georgia, like many US states, has struggled to contain the coronavirus with almost 7000 deaths in a state of 10m people.

Both players keep in touch with family in Ireland, and have conflicting views on how the two countries are dealing with the virus.

“It's like two different worlds,” Gallagher says. “Here, everything is open for so long. It just seems back to normal at times, whereas my mum was telling me that they were threatening another lockdown in Ireland because of a spike. It was a small enough number of cases, but if you had that number in our county here in Atlanta, that would be an amazing day.

“Everything is pretty normal, apart from wearing the mask. Sometimes you forget there's something going on.” 

Mulraney's girlfriend and their toddler daughter were in Ireland from May to September.

He said: “It was tough enough, in her first couple of weeks back she took a while to warm up to me, she was a mammy's girl. But I think it's done right here. It's not mandatory to wear a mask, some places require it, some don't. Ireland – you have 100 cases and they're threatening lockdown, and here that's almost grand.

“It's like people are forgetting about it.”