Exclusive! Man Utd's Alessia Russo: 'When you can’t play you feel useless' | OneFootball

“I was in a geology class. Phil Neville was the coach at the time and he texted me saying: ‘Hi Lessi, have you got a minute?'”

It’s January 2020 and Alessia Russo, studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just received her first England call-up – while in class.

“As soon as you get that sort of message your heart goes a little bit,” she continues. “So I left the class and he rang me and said ‘just to let you know, we’re going to be calling you up for the next camp’.

“It was amazing. I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the class.”

A college study room isn’t the first place that comes to mind when receiving such momentous news but like all answers from Russo, it was honest, insightful and showed just why she’s one of the most highly-rated young players in the English game right now.

At 22-years-old Russo can rightly be considered one of the up-and-coming forces in the Women’s Super League but the tales from her career feel like they should come from a veteran with decades of experience.

Two continents, four clubs, two major injuries and almost half a century of senior goals, Russo has gone through the footballing mill and come out the other side to tell the story.

The first of those injuries came in America on a soccer scholarship.

North Carolina Tar Heels are one of the most storied college programmes in American women’s soccer and Russo was their star striker, having moved to the States after impressing at both Chelsea and Brighton as a teenager.

“When I was at Chelsea, I had a coach called Mark Parsons, and he went to America,” Russo explains.

“I kind of always had known about America and the college system and the league out there. And I thought if it’s good enough for the USWNT, who all go through the college system and have won so much, then I thought it would be good enough for me.

“We had an Under-17 World Cup in Jordan and right after that I went out and visited the University of North Carolina and fell in love with the coaches, the players, the place, the weather and decided that that was where I wanted to go.”

A brilliant freshman year followed. She scored nine goals in 19 games and was named the Atlantic Coast Conference Freshman of the Year, all while wearing their legendary number 19 jersey – the same worn by Mia Hamm and Crystal Dunn – and one they took out of retirement for Russo.

“I didn’t know what shirt number I was going to be, I didn’t think about it too much to be honest.

“But when I got over there the coach said ‘we’re thinking of giving you the number 19 shirt’. And I thought ‘ah that’s cool, I’ve never worn 19 before’.

“They then said they were going to bring it out of retirement and told me about Crystal and Mia wearing it before and then I was kind of like ‘woah’.

“I didn’t know the magnitude that this shirt held but I guess I had to step up to the challenge of it in my Freshman. You go in as a Freshman and have to try and impress.”

Impress she did but then came one of the first major hurdles of her career – a terrible leg break which required surgery and months out of the game.

“A ball got played through, I was running in one-on-one with the goalkeeper, and I thought I could just dink it over her. I just planted my foot, she came down and and her knee just came and went into my shin and fractured the bottom.”

Almost half a year of recovery followed but Russo’s mental toughness – as well as an extended visit from her parents – helped ease the pain in those dark, early months in the medical room.

“It is hard,” she says. “Injuries are horrible. It really helped having my parents there at the toughest phase of it all. That was massive. If they weren’t out there it would have made things so much more difficult.

“You’re in America, thousands of miles away from home and you’re there to play football. And when you can’t play football, you feel a bit useless.

“But at the same time, the thing about being at university is there are so many other things to take your mind off it, so I kind of threw myself into my classes a bit more.”

Like everyone in March last year though, Russo went into lockdown because of COVID-19 and with the situation causing havoc for the college season, a decision had to be made.

Stay in the States for one more year or come home 12 months early and join a club?

When Manchester United came calling, that decision was essentially made for her.

“It was amazing. It made the decision a lot easier because how can you turn down a club like that?

“At the time Casey [Stoney] was the manager and I have huge respect for her, what she’s done as a player and as a manager. I think that the direction she was putting the club in was unbelievable. And for such a new club to be achieving so much early on was exciting for me.

“The players that they had were a lot of young players and I thought that was the right opportunity and fitted perfectly for me as a person and as a player. I could have maybe looked to have stayed in the US and gone in the draft, but the uncertainty of it all made my decision for me.”

The goals soon followed. Three in four WSL appearances showed Russo was right at home at the top of the women’s game, with her debut strike against Brighton a particularly impressive finish.

And then, more bad news.

“I tore my hamstring,” she explained.

“With my broken leg l could understand because it was in a tackle and there was nothing I could have really done about it.

“But when I tore my hamstring, I was sort of racking my brains. I feel with muscle injuries you question yourself. I was thinking ‘am I overtraining?’, ‘was I not fit enough?’.

“So lots of questions were going through my mind like ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘why now?’ – it was a really tough time for me in football, I’d just come back over and was just finding my feet, starting that journey at Manchester United and just getting back into England camps as well.”

More hard work in the gym followed but Russo is now back in the Man United XI and scored her first international goals – a quick-fire, second-half hat-trick – in the World Cup qualifier against Latvia at the end of November.

With the European Championships next summer being played at home in England, the next seven months could take her career stratospheric.

But is that in her mind right now?

“Obviously I’ve got one eye on the Euros,” she says.

“I have high aspirations for myself as a player, we have so much talent in the England squad, especially in attack. So all I can do right now is play well for my club, keep getting called up for squads and then do well in camp.

“The first game next summer is at Old Trafford, so to play in that would be the pinnacle so far – at home, at Old Trafford – I just want to work towards that for the rest of the season.”

She has certainly come a long way from that geology class.