• Joined ESPN in 2011
• Covered two Olympics, a pair of Rugby World Cups and two British & Irish Lions tours
• Previously rugby editor, and became senior writer in 2018
SALZBURG, Austria -- Brenden and Paxten Aaronson are on FaceTime, debating who is better at pingpong. Janell and Rusty, their parents, are listening in, smiling at the familiarity of it all. After all, 6,000 miles does nothing to dilute the fraternal rivalry between two of America's most gifted young footballers.
Brenden, 21, is home for the day after finishing his double training session at FC Salzburg. Paxten, 18, is just starting his routine at the Philadelphia Union. Rusty, Janell and daughter Jaden, 15, are sitting in Brenden's flat in Anif, a picturesque village on the outskirts of Salzburg, Austria. They've heard these back-and-forths since the boys were young.
- Paxten: Who won at pingpong the last time, me? - Brenden: No. You didn't. No chance. I won, I kicked your butt. - Paxten: Dad, dad remember ... - Brenden: No, it was Christmas Eve ... - Paxten: He was beating me and then I finally got the rhythm back and I started whooping his ass. - Brenden: OK, you got your rhythm back but then I crushed you like 10 times at night and you threw your paddle -- you kept slamming your paddle! - Paxten: I ended up winning the series three to two because I won the last game! - Brenden: That was after I beat you five times.
At this point, Janell interjects: "OK, we could go on and on for hours..."
"If it's cornhole, I'd win as I'm a sharpshooter," Paxten says. "Yeah, but I'd beat you at golf," Brenden returns. Janell can only roll her eyes and laugh.
It's good-natured banter between the brothers, who have grown up to be best friends. The one sport they do not squabble about, really, is soccer. When Rusty asks who would be the team's first-choice No.10 if they were in the same squad, there's a slightly awkward to-and-fro, resulting in detente. Time zones mean Brenden checks his phone first thing to see how Paxten has done, while Paxten catches up with Salzburg games after training. The two offer advice to one another.
It has always been like this -- the two growing up three years apart, but on the same trajectory, starting their pro careers with Major League Soccer's Philadelphia Union, hitting their growth spurts late and generally causing all sorts of mischief on the field. They both scored in their first MLS starts and are part of this nascent golden generation of U.S. men's national team talent. Brenden is in the mix to go to Qatar 2022, while Paxten could yet gate-crash the tournament depending on form and injuries. Brenden already has two league titles to his name at FC Salzburg from his two years in the Austrian Bundesliga, while Paxten will surely one day follow his brother to Europe, with several clubs already interested.
In short, they're special players with rare talent -- arguably the best brothers to break through in U.S. men's soccer history. But you wouldn't know it from talking to them: they're just polite, young chaps who happen to be incredibly gifted. They talk quickly and run even faster, but they walk slowly. Everything football throws at them is taken in their stride.
That's the way they have been raised and how they live their lives: in the end, they're two brothers from Medford, New Jersey, lighting up U.S. soccer in their own way.
The Aaronsons suggest we meet by the "big yellow house" on Getreidegasse. It's where Salzburg's most famous son, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, grew up. Brenden walks up, introduces himself and his family before we wander off, free to be tourists for the afternoon.
Brenden is well-known in football circles and while he gets spotted when he's back in the USA -- Janell later recalls the shock at seeing her boy get asked for an autograph in Sarasota, Florida -- he lives anonymously in Austria. The only people who recognise him are a couple of his teammates, who are stretching their legs on a walk the day after their 2-1 win away at Austria Wien.
When the Aaronsons heard of FC Salzburg's interest in Brenden, their knowledge of the area was predominantly instructed by "The Sound of Music," which was filmed in and around the city. Their first visit was when he arrived as a €6m signing in January 2021 amid another wave of the coronavirus pandemic. His parents travelled with him; when the Aaronson trio arrived in Salzburg, they doubled the number of people staying in their hotel near the banks of the Salzach river. While his mom "dealt with IKEA," as Brenden puts it, he spent time at the club getting to know his new teammates and in a time of lockdown, that was his only social interaction.
Brenden found it hard adjusting at first. He'd only ever lived with his parents in Medford, a small town in New Jersey with a population of 23,000. That's where he and his siblings -- Paxten, Jaden, all of them gifted athletes -- live.
Soccer has always run in the family's blood. Rusty played in college at Monmouth and coaches a successful high-level youth club, Real Jersey in New Jersey. The kids tried every sport, but Brenden fell for soccer and Paxten later followed suit. "The boys were having fun," Rusty says. "I see the pressure some fathers put on their boys -- I mean we were there at Mozart's house, reading about the pressure his father put on him. That's one way to go, but it's not our way, or my way. I remember the first time I played football with both of my boys in the backyard ... it was amazing. I thought, 'I'm making a comeback!'"
"It was a big commitment from all of us," Janell says. "We used to have to drive three hours a day [from Medford] to take them to the academy [Philadelphia Union's YSC]. And then you realise what they sacrificed too: they missed dances, going out with their friends. Our vacations would be soccer trips."
Brenden and Paxten were initially small for their age. Rusty would watch on from the sidelines as his boys had to "fight, kick and scratch" to hold their own in matches, dwarfed by other players at their age level. Brenden says that time was "hard" as he was "getting killed and bodied the whole time."
Rusty remembers watching on during those brutal training sessions. "It did bother me when I saw Brenden beat a kid and then, as they were bigger, they'd grab him and throw him on the ground," Rusty says. "The other coaches would chuckle. But no matter how beaten they were, and they were always beaten down a bunch of times with their size, they kept on going."
"We said to them, 'There's always going to be someone better than you, so the whole point is, every single day you have to do your best,'" Janell says. "You have to be happy. I think one advantage they had when young was that as they weren't the strongest, they had to be smart with their soccer IQ and their feet."
When Brenden was close to his 16th birthday, he hit a growth spurt. "I was like a big giraffe on ice: I couldn't get my feet right, but I stuck at it," Brenden says.
Paxten's physical and footballing trajectory was similar. Both coped with rejection as the age-grade U.S. sides initially overlooked them due to their size. "I felt at a young age I was never truly under the spotlight," Brenden says. "I had to grow, and I remember not getting called into the youth national camps. I remember my first U14 camp, I cried, you know, because it was tough missing out. I didn't go to the U20 World Cup either, but my mum and dad always said, 'Focus on working hard and doing the stuff behind the scenes.'"
The setbacks helped them grow, while their parents also adapted as they got accustomed to this new world.
"I was reading a note today on my phone from Chris Brewer, one of our favourite coaches for Brenden from the Academy," Rusty says. "He told me, back when Brenden was 13 years old, that he'd be a pro. But we were sitting there at the end-of-season parents' evening, and he told me: 'Who cares at all about the national team at 15? He shouldn't care, you shouldn't care. It probably stings a little bit, but he will be on the national team by the time he's 21.'"
The original plan was for Brenden to go to college at Indiana, but he continued his education at Philadelphia's YSC, playing for their feeder club Bethlehem Steel in the USL Championship (U.S. soccer's second tier) from 2017 to 2018 before then graduating into the Union first team while finishing high school. "It was different back then to how it is now," Janell says. "Apart from people like Christian Pulisic or Weston McKennie, most kids would go to College and get drafted from there. There weren't many home-grown players at Philadelphia then -- it's evolved very quickly to where it is now."
The family was always adjusting, like when agents came knocking. "When it first happens and these boys are in their teens, they have no real idea of what's going on," Janell says. "You have to manage your children so you guide them as best you can, without interfering." The first agent they chose didn't work out, so Rusty took temporary stewardship over Brenden. But he soon found it too much for him, so they went with another agency.
Brenden had strong guidance throughout -- his grandfather Jan has been a voracious reader on football, his father has strong business acumen and a love of the sport, while his mother has looked after his finances -- but when it comes to club decisions, and the final decisions on contracts or transfers, it's their son's call. When Salzburg came in with a bid for Brenden, he had other offers on the table -- including one from the Premier League, and another from Belgium -- and while those were more lucrative, the Aaronsons looked at the long game.
"We have always said, with everything, that we'd rather you take a baby step than go from one extreme to another," Janell says. "We've seen so many players get left in the dust -- a laundry list of them."
The training ground at FC Salzburg is empty, so Brenden gives a quick tour of the club's state-of-the-art facilities. There's a wall of football boots just by the door that leads you to the first-team practice pitch. The biggest cluster of piled shoes lies next to the cubbyhole numbered 11: Brenden loves boots and is always trying out new models. "They let me out [watch training] there," Rusty says. "He genuinely loves his teammates. They're young guys, it's competitive as hell, but he gets along with them. The coaches too are young."
