News "broke" last night – via a post on the website of Jamaican club Harbour View FC – that it had agreed to terms with the Philadelphia Union on a loan agreement for 21-year-old forward Brian Brown. While the Union have yet to make the loan capture official, a club source confirmed that they are in the latter stages of negotiations with the player and a deal could be finalized at some point this week.

That source also confirmed a separate release from Harbour View that Brown had been on trial with the club. (And if further proof is needed, Brown’s Facebook page, as referred by Harbour View’s official feed, features a header image of the Union’s locker room.)



The connections to the Union are numerous. First, goalkeeper Andre Blake, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2014 MLS SuperDraft, came through the youth setup at Harbour View. Blake is part of an uptick in Jamaican influence in MLS in recent years, with three of the first eight picks in the 2014 SuperDraft (including No. 7 Andre Lewis and No. 8 Damion Lowe) hailing from the island nation along with the top scorer from the 2013 draft, Colorado’s Deshorn Brown.

Brown’s agent, per the Harbour View release, is Damani Ralph, who spent two seasons as a high-scoring forward in MLS with the Chicago Fire … where he was a teammate of Union manager Jim Curtin. (Coincidentally, Ralph also followed the same Harbour-View-to-University-of-Connecticut path as Blake.)

And here’s one more coincidence: Brown was on trial in 2012 with Aston Villa in England … at the same time that a young Union forward named Danny Mwanga was also being vetted by then manager Alex McLeish. Neither signed, the reasoning behind Brown’s refusal probably having something to do with the looming issue of getting a UK work permit given the fact that he’d yet to appear for Jamaica.
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