Brenden Aaronson’s World Cup journey started in his family’s New Jersey basement - The Athletic 15/11/22

Sam Stejskal

To better understand the U.S. men’s national team before it begins the World Cup in Qatar, The Athletic traveled to the hometowns of several of its most important figures. We found a squad shaped not only by American society, but also influenced by traditions from every corner of the globe.

Brenden Aaronson’s parents finished the basement of the family home in Medford, N.J. a few years back. It’s well-appointed now; a nicely furnished, spacious shrine to the many soccer successes of the Aaronson clan.

Brenden is the star of the family — at least for the moment. The 22-year-old midfielder is having a strong first season with Premier League club Leeds United and should play a key role for the U.S. men’s national team at the World Cup.

His 19-year-old brother Paxten seems to be on a similar path. He is a highly-regarded midfielder who led the U.S. to a CONCACAF U-20 Championship in July and is on his way from MLS Cup runners-up Philadelphia Union to Eintracht Frankfurt. The golden boot and golden ball that Paxten won as the top scorer and best player at the CONCACAF tournament are prominently displayed in the family’s basement, practically shimmering in place atop a cabinet along a far wall. Brenden and Paxten’s younger sister Jaden, now a sophomore in high school, is a promising player in her own right, too.

Most of the memorabilia, though, is related to Brenden. A bookcase holds the balls with which he scored his first goals for Philadelphia, Red Bull Salzburg and the USMNT, all signed by his teammates from those games. A Leeds United-themed painting, complete with a callout to former manager Marcelo Bielsa and an image of the famed Old Peacock pub located across the street from Elland Road, hangs nearby.

There are jerseys everywhere, most draped on coat racks. Many of them are Brenden’s from his time with the Union, where he played from 2014 until he was transferred to Salzburg in January 2021. Some of the shirts were obtained in swaps with other MLS players. There’s a Zlatan Ibrahimovic jersey from the Swede’s time with the LA Galaxy somewhere down here, though Brenden was a bit too shy to ask for that one himself. Then-Union teammate Haris Medunjanin, who, like Ibrahimovic, has a Bosnian background, got it for him.

For all of the trophies, famous shirts and signed collectables, the pièce de résistance is actually a meme: A blown-up, Old West-style “wanted” poster commemorating Brenden’s first MLS goal, on his debut in March 2019.

On the left side of the poster is a picture of a young Brenden in a U.S. jersey — he looks like he’s about 10. On the right are a pair of images of Atlanta United and former U.S. goalkeeper Brad Guzan. One shows Aaronson’s shot trickling past the wrongfooted ‘keeper; the other shows the veteran falling onto his backside at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, arms stretched in disbelief, face bearing a look of disgust.

“Wanted for elder abuse,” the poster screams. “Brenden Aaronson: Also known as the Medford Messi.”

That nickname is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Aaronson still has some rough edges to smooth out. That said, his strengths are many. He’s a tireless and excellent presser, good in tight spaces and adept at getting himself into dangerous positions. Many of those skills were developed back in the family basement in Medford, before it was spruced up and filled with an ever-growing stash of keepsakes.

When Aaronson was growing up, the basement had a concrete floor, dim lighting and load-bearing pillars. It wasn’t the most inviting space in the world, but his father Rusty, who was a midfielder at Monmouth University and spent a couple of years in the early-’90s playing semi-professionally in the U.S., turned it into something of an incubator for his soccer-crazed kids.

He created a miniature indoor field for Brenden, Paxten and Jaden, laying a large piece of carpet over the concrete floor and bookending it with a pair of small goals. Brenden and Paxten spent countless hours down there, facing off against each other in competitive, occasionally ill-tempered games of one-on-one, or inviting other kids over for larger matches.

A pair of brothers who lived down the street — J.D. and Zach Wagner, who both now play at the U.S. Naval Academy — were there most often. Over time, the Aaronson and Wagner families grew close, often spending Christmas Eve together. Brenden, Paxten, J.D. and Zach would face off in the basement for pre-dinner matches, eventually drawing the whole of both families downstairs to watch some pretty serious holiday tussles.

“It’d be the younger brothers against the older. The young guys, we would always play the scrappy game,” said Paxten. “We would sit back, Zach would play goalie, which would piss the older brothers off, they would drill shots at him and he’d take them in the chest, then I would just kind of cherry pick or get the counter and go and score. Christmas Eve, when we would play and then go up and have dinner together, those are definitely the best memories. When it was just me and Brenden, the best times were just in the dead of winter, it was snow all over, you’d be snowed in, off from school and we would just come down and play for hours.”

Rusty’s construction of the ad-hoc indoor facility didn’t come completely out of the blue – he had long been a soccer junkie. A couple of years before Brenden was born, he spent almost two months in Buenos Aires on a series of work trips. Every night, as his colleagues would go out for dinner and drinks, Rusty, who had a long career as an investigator for large corporations, would head to the Boca Juniors facility to watch their youth teams and reserves. He wasn’t there for a particular purpose — he just enjoyed being around the game. He did, however, jot down some notes in a journal that he still has buried in a box in the basement, highlighting drills that he thought were especially useful. When his job allowed, Rusty would join Brenden and Paxten in the basement for impromptu training sessions.

“It was a lot of work on the little things, the attention to detail,” Rusty said over cheesesteaks on the family’s back patio, sitting alongside his wife Janell, Brenden, Paxten and Jaden’s mother. “How to open your body and hips at the right moment — you need to open now. It’s like a gate, and you can’t miss it. We would spend hours on this. We used to call it catching. If you watch Brenden or Paxten catch it in a pocket, around defenders, they’re almost better at that than a wide open touch because they had those walls in the basement and they had the feedback: ‘No, wrong. Yes, perfect.’”

“There was just so much respect in the whole entire relationship, too,” said Janell. “It was having a dad that wasn’t a drill sergeant, nasty or put-down, and two kids that just wanted to be sponges. It was reciprocal. It was, ‘I will help you get better, just give me your time.’ And they were like, ‘Yes! We want to do that.’”

Rusty would often put Brenden and Paxten through one of the simplest of those drills at home in Medford. He’d have the boys stand in the middle of a small square he taped onto the carpeted “field” in the basement, fire a ball into their feet, then have them take a series of quick touches around the perimeter. When one brother was receiving the ball, the other would often apply pressure.

The boys’ ability to receive the ball in tight spaces and wriggle out of trouble? Both Rusty and Paxten put part of that skill down to those drills.

“When I think of me and Brenden’s games, I think about technical ability, getting out of tight spaces, killing the ball on your first touch and then using quick dribbles and little moves to get free,” said Paxten. “The basement helped give us that. It’s just navigating around like those tight spaces, using the poles, just like lots of quick thinking. Then my dad would always train our first touch. That square, keep your touch in the box, then dribble around it quickly. All those things that we kind of learned when we were little, and I think this is the case with a lot of players, but those things that we were first taught kind of stuck with us.”

“There’s another poster on the wall down in the basement today, though it’s hidden away behind a closed door, tacked up in an unfinished storage area. It dates all the way back to those early sessions. Written on it are a few different messages from Rusty to his kids. The headline: “Perfect practice makes perfect play.”

Of course, much of that practice occurred in places other than the basement. Brenden and Paxten played outside in the family’s large backyard as much as the New Jersey weather would allow. When he wasn’t working, Rusty would be right there alongside the boys, sometimes to the consternation of Janell.

“There were so many nights we’d be out here in the snow, in the rain, and she’d be like, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?’” Rusty said.

“There were times I had enough,” Janell laughed.

“And I’d be like, ‘What do you want me to do? Look at their faces!’” Rusty continued. “And Janell said this a number of times, ‘Rusty, really? Are they gonna be professional soccer players? What are we doing?’”

One year, when he was about to turn 10 or 11, Brenden begged his parents for a full-size goal for his birthday. It was a long-shot ask, the kind of cost-prohibitive wishlist item that kids often pine for and parents always dread. The Aaronsons figured they had no shot at finding a decent goal for an affordable price, but, by some miracle, Janell stumbled across a promising listing on Craigslist. If the Aaronsons could move the goal from the owner’s house, they could have it for free.

Only problem? It weighed a ton. Rusty, who was running his own business at the time, had to hire a large flatbed truck and bring eight or nine of his employees out to what Janell called “a postage stamp yard” to load the goal on board. They delivered it to the Aaronson’s house just in time for Brenden’s birthday. The employees, Rusty made sure to note, all got lunch covered that day. The Aaronsons still have the goal.

“He was so excited, so excited,” said Janell. “I don’t think he ever thought he was going to get that. Neither did we, really.”

“The greatest thing is when you hit the crossbar, the ball bounces back like 30 yards the other way,” said Rusty. “That thing is solid steel, man. It’s crazy.”

A year or two after the goal arrived, Brenden began to progress beyond the level of the local travel team. He needed a higher standard of competition if he was to continue growing as a player. At that point, the Union academy wasn’t really up and running. The closest high-level youth club was Players Development Academy, located about an hour-and-a-half north of Medford in Somerset, N.J.

Regularly driving three hours round-trip to haul one of their three kids to soccer practice wasn’t exactly appealing for the Aaronsons, but their alternatives were pretty limited: It was either spend their life in the car or start something new closer to home.

They chose the latter. Rusty met with a man named Bob Hampton, who was coaching two youth teams under the banner of a club he’d founded in Medford called Real Jersey FC. He let Rusty add a third squad to the club for Brenden.

Eventually, Paxten and Jaden joined Real Jersey, too. Rusty and Janell took leadership roles in the growing club, which now includes 25 different teams and has squads in the MLS Next Pro academy league and the elite Girls Academy League. Rusty is club president and serves as head coach of Jaden’s U-17 team. Janell helps manage the organization’s finances. Neither of them draw payment from the club.

Brenden and Paxten didn’t stay with Real Jersey too long. They both moved to the Union academy full-time relatively young, progressed through the club’s USL side and eventually signed homegrown contracts with the first team. Their growth wasn’t linear; both players were late bloomers physically, which made playing time hard to come by for a couple of years during their stints in the Union academy, especially for Brenden.

But even when he wasn’t getting minutes for Philadelphia’s youth teams, Brenden had a rare amount of resources to work on his game: At-home indoor and outdoor setups most kids could only dream of, a dad who understood the game and a supremely talented younger brother to compete against.

That continued even after he turned pro. Brenden had a solid first season in MLS in 2019, but the COVID-19-induced shutdown threatened to hinder his trajectory in 2020. While some of his teammates struggled to obtain even a sole soccer ball while the league was suspended that spring, Brenden had the run of a top-class indoor center that Rusty had just opened a few minutes down the road. The facility was closed to the public while the pandemic raged, but Brenden and Paxten would head there most every day for one-on-one matches, grown up versions of the games they used to play on that little swath of carpet in the basement.

When they’d get home, they’d often head straight to the backyard to practice their finishing on the old, hulking goal. Missed shots would fly into the same woods that Janell, who grew up on the property in a house right next door to the Aaronson home, spent her childhood criss-crossing on a dirt bike.

Janell’s parents still live in that house, which shares a driveway with the Aaronson residence. Her father, Jan Evans, didn’t know a thing about soccer when Brenden, Paxten and Jaden began throwing themselves into the game, but he wanted to find a way to help his grandkids in the sport. After some conversations with Rusty, Jan, a retired lawyer, decided to dive deep on visualization.

“He took it and ran with it,” said Rusty. “He’s interviewed all kinds of people, he’s studied, he’s a firm believer that it’s helped both boys. And I’m a firm believer in that, too. It’s really been so important to have them have that other voice to help them out. Paxten, even if he’s not playing, he goes over before every game to work on the mental side. And Brenden, before (Leeds’ Oct. 9 match against) Crystal Palace, we’re talking and he’s like, ‘Alright, Dad. Love ya. I’m gonna call Pop Pop now.’ It’s like one of their rituals. They have to do it, where they talk to him and go through a visualization exercise.”

All of this may seem like a bit much. Obsessive to the point that it’s unhealthy; perhaps a concerning case of stage parenting. Spend time with the family, though, and it seems as if they’re all just really, genuinely passionate about soccer.

Even now, as he’s turning heads in the Premier League and contributing to wins against Chelsea and at Liverpool, Brenden still falls down soccer highlight reel rabbit holes, not emerging until he sends a link to something like an 18-minute Luka Modric compilation video to his dad and brother. Jaden took a bit longer to get into the game than her brothers, but she’s all-in now, too. Janell is the only member of the family who never played the sport, but it’s clear that she’s fiercely proud of her kids and the path they’re forging.

For his part, Paxten feels like none of the Aaronson kids ever felt any pressure from their parents to work harder in the sport. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“They never pushed us,” he said. “I mean, I can probably only remember like one or two times in my life where my Dad was like, ‘Alright, we should probably go train today.’ One was maybe like last year, when we were both already pro. But when we were younger, no. It was us. He probably got sick of it, because it’d be like every single second of the day, we’d be like, ‘Dad, can you please come work with us?’ I give him so much credit. He was so busy at the time, trying to handle work and everything, but he always made time for us. I can’t think of a time when we were younger when he wasn’t out there helping us.”

Every player has a different journey to the World Cup, every family a different story. The Aaronsons’ began in the basement of a house in the woods of southern New Jersey and included easy access to a remarkable amount of resources, a competitive, demanding environment, a whole lot of talent and an uncommon amount of familial and individual dedication. This month, it’ll continue with its most important chapter yet: Brenden’s shot at the World Cup in Qatar.