All that obscures the blue sky is the lush foliage of the trees lining the avenue as the two US college age sweethearts, squeezed onto one e-scooter, barrel down the cycleway. The boy, holding a selfie stick, switches their camera between front and back views as he films their lush surroundings passing by at some speed, then their excited faces, the girl giggling, the boy laughing more nervously, perhaps with a small thought for his legs and his career. But who cares about that when you’re young? ‘Pov,’ the text on the screen says, ‘you’re scootering your way through Europe w the love of your life.’ The caption beneath reads, ‘Absolutely zero complaints here.’

Or take another video, posted on TikTok with the caption, ‘This cafe will forever have a place in my heart’. The video shows half-drunk coffees on the table, ham and eggs for brunch, along with bread and jam, orange juice with slices of fruit wedged on the glass. It pans across the green and white striped umbrellas protecting tables from the sun on this terrace, over to a gorgeous city square; there are pale pink and blue buildings with more cafe tables spilling across the clean stones. A young couple goes cycling slowly through as if cued by Wes Anderson. The chosen music is ‘La Dolce Vita’.

There’s one captioned ‘dreamiest running path — will I ever stop posting about this path? no’, showing the two out for a run along a tarmac route winding between fields of flowers, flat to the horizon where the Alps rise. Some hens peck between the dandelions; there’s a shed filled with docile cows, a farmhouse from an animated love story. A similar video, with a church and a few horses, and a clean, fast-flowing river, is simply captioned, ‘fairytale land’. TikTok put a warning on another clip, advising viewers before they watched about ‘Sensitive content: some people may find this video to be disturbing.’ Tapping ‘Watch anyway’ revealed a slideshow of cutesy happy coupley photos taken on dreamy days on snowy Alpine trails, skipping through Austrian meadows. I certainly did find this content disturbing because my mouldy old heart didn’t know whether to celebrate their happiness or envy it while my last pretences of youth crumbled to dust. Oh to be young and healthy, to be rich athletes abroad in love with each other and their life. In Salzburg.

I love Yorkshire, because I was born here and have lived most of my life here and am tuned in to its darker, idiosyncratic beauty. I welcome USA international midfielder Brenden Aaronson to Leeds United Football Club after his big money transfer from Red Bull Salzburg and I’m looking forward to seeing him play. I hope he and the woman he calls ‘the girlfriend’ in a Red Bull ‘Day in the Life‘ video, Milana, will be very happy here. But I have deliberately waited until after the contract is signed before voicing a thought that nags at me whenever I look at their social media shares: why would anyone leave Champions League football and a lifestyle lifted from The Sound of Music for the bottom of the Premier League and life in fucking Leeds? Leeds is splendid. Leeds is my home. But the other day, on a ‘nice’ morning when it was only raining a bit, I watched from my window as three rats chased each other around my neighbour’s lawn. I keep imagining Brenden and Milana throwing back the curtains of their new home to drizzle-filled Yorkshire skies, opening the window to let in the stench from the dung-strewn farms, thinking about the drive into training alongside not the Alps but a Cat C Prison. At that moment they remember the previous day’s visit to the city centre, searching for a bit of their old life in Mitteleuropa, and finding only Dortmund Square. And I’m picturing the pair of them bursting into tears.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brenden Aaronson (@baaronson7)

The videos I mentioned are all from Milana’s TikTok, which blooms whenever she travels from the USA to visit the love of her life in fairytale land. According to Brenden’s happy birthday post on Instagram, she just joined him across the threshold of American legal drinking age a month ago. He only turned 21 in October, and last month when Salzburg won the league and he had his first experience of winning a trophy in a full European stadium and was doused with lager, he said, “I’m not a big drinker but maybe I’ll have one.” I’m not surprised he’s not a big drinker. He barely even looks like a big shaver yet. He’s fifteen months older than Sam Greenwood, but Sam is from Sunderland and looks like an old man next to our new chum. Milana plays football too, at least when a series of what must be intensely frustrating knee surgeries allows her, and her Instagram shows her posing in full kit with a ponytail, a ball under her arm and a big smile, ready for a game. I have checked with two friends who have first hand experience of West Yorkshire women’s football and they, while respecting that she plays at a high level in the US, shivered and gave her about five minutes in their league before some hard-faced centre-back tackles her into the car park. “Line her up against Chester le Street and she’s fucked,” said one.

It is, as Rachel Cooper says in The Night of the Hunter, “a hard world for little things.” I think Brenden is Leeds United’s first first-team player to be so thoroughly of the TikTok generation, and it represents a shift, a shuffle in a squad dominated by dads. Pat Bamford and Kalvin Phillips dabbled with TikTok early in lockdown, but that was obviously a product of boredom and it was soon forgotten about. It says something about the app that Kalvin, aged 26, is too old for it. Charlie Cresswell is the right age, but he has the demeanour and music tastes — country and western — of an experienced substitute teacher. I have not seen Cresswell dancing on social media; I have seen him headbutting a punchbag. On Milana’s TikTok, she and Brenden are often found trying the new trends and challenges, having the proper goofy fun that they, as twenty year olds, should. But I picture them doing the Fortnite default dance in front of their new friends at Leeds, collapsing into fits of giggles, and looking up to see Stuart Dallas gazing at them with his face in neutral like an old family labrador suffering a basket full of puppies being brought into the home. The recent Wagatha Christie trial brought out an unpleasant side of Premier League culture; the bit that stood out to me amid Rebekah Vardy’s c-bomb texts about Colleen Rooney was this thoughtless collateral damage, about who Rooney had not removed from her Instagram page: ‘I mean ffs Dawn fucking ward is still on there x’. Quite what the wife of Leicester City’s reserve goalkeeper ever did to anybody is beyond me, but it doesn’t seem to take much.

What I’m thinking about, with all this, is motivation. If I was Brenden Aaronson, and I was 21, earning thousands every week to kick a ball around in Salzburg in the mornings with Red Bull’s deliberately young squad, and relax with my beloved along Alpine trails in the afternoon, with an all-but guaranteed league title every year — Salzburg lost two of 32 games last season, with a goal difference of +58 — granting entry to the Champions League to play Wolfsburg, Lille, Sevilla and Bayern Munich, I simply would not move to Leeds. I would consider that my life was made, my days were perfect, my health and happiness were at their highest, and I would do all I could to maintain those things, which actually would not have to be much. It’s a problem beyond Aaronson, as footballers become richer faster, for clubs to convince young millionaires to put the best years of their lives into harder work. How many, given big contracts in their teens, will lose their ambition well before their thirties, or retain it beyond the first club to offer them a nice life and a bank account that will never empty? Jack Grealish is 26 and at time of writing is celebrating his first league title like it’s his last. Who could blame him, but also, who can picture him being arsed to play for another team once he’s won everything with Manchester City? Meanwhile, we’re hoping for a reverse effect with Kalvin Phillips. He might win trophies at another club, but isn’t Leeds his life, and isn’t Leeds enough for him? (Brenden, please do not tell Kalvin how nice other places are, thank you.)

For Brenden Aaronson to turn his back on all he had in Salzburg and sign for Leeds, in a harder league in a harder place, suggests that below the stats and the tactical profiles is a determined lad who wants to be the best player in the best league. One of the saddest recent moments in European cinema comes at the end of Salzburg’s ‘Day in the Life’ video about Aaronson when he silently pretends to be playing video games in his empty apartment (thank god he says his parents are arriving the next day — what a glimpse of the downside of playing abroad when your family or girlfriend isn’t there). Just before that he’s talking himself up to the camera: “You’ll see, I’ve got this scuffed controller, you know? I go pretty hard on gaming. I got to be the best.” ESPN’s recent profile of Brenden and his younger brother Paxten, an eighteen year old following the family path through Philadelphia Union, goes heavy on their fraternal competition, dramatising their argument over Facetime about who won their last ping-pong tournament, neither giving an inch. The same article includes a photo of Brenden as a young player, before his growth spurt at sixteen, when he barely came up to the chests of the boys he was playing against. The young Aaronson was consistently written off by coaches for not being big or strong enough, and dad Rusty used to:

…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.”

That was a choice, to keep going and prove something, and moving to Leeds is a choice, too. I’m slipping into the language of Marcelo Bielsa here, telling Benjamin Mendy at Marseille that, because he could be the best left-back in the world, he had to decide:

“Being the best, it takes away happiness. It takes away hours with your wife. It takes away hours with friends. It takes away parties. It takes away fun. You have a very big problem.”

Brenden, with Milana, is choosing to make that his problem. He must be determined to do this, to be a Premier League star, a USA World Cup player. Milana must have it, too; the long scars from the big operations on her knee show her determination to have her own playing career. They’ve stuck together in a long-distance relationship through Covid-19, hard times, even for the young and Facetime savvy. As a pair, moving to England, just a few months past their 21st birthdays, is a move into adulthood, a coming of age. That is not an easy time for anyone, even without wearing the heavy shirt of Leeds United, a £23m price tag, and having your social media accounts armchair analysed by the likes of me. Three months in Leeds aged Jesse Marsch about five years, and he’s already been around the world — “I’m at 73 countries right now,” he told Sky Sports the other week, “I want to get to 100, so that’s one of my life goals.” I will feel guilt on behalf of my club and my city and my county if, a year from now, Brenden and Milana are seen looking haggard and worried as they’re mithering each other glumly around the Merrion Centre. We have to find a way of making sure that Leeds is somewhere our young American friends can have a nice life. Perhaps if they stick around until the new park is built next to The Tetley they’ll be okay, and there’s going to be a forest soon in City Square that might be cute. They’ve already eaten out at Tattu, so once they’ve been to that dine-and-dance place Tom Zanetti was opening and blocked Terry George from their phones, I don’t know how much else Leeds has to offer. Fingers crossed they like Laynes. Otherwise, it’s up to the club to make sure they live in Knaresborough in the cute bit by the bridge, and are only ever allowed to look at the cute bit of Knaresborough by the bridge. Brenden likes horror movies so a trip to Whitby is okay but nobody can let them get as far north as Redcar. York is obviously a must, regularly, and Bolton Abbey. In terms of countryside, we have to persuade them out of The Sound of Music and into Wuthering Heights. I can actually picture Brenden with his dark curls storming across the moors like Heathcliff, Milana leaning into a gale like Cathy. I just want them to be happy! ⬢