Leeds should buy Aaronson in the summer: here’s why

Brenden Aaronson is a young American attacking midfielder who plays for RB Salzburg in the top flight of Austrian football. Aaronson has been linked with a possible summer move to Leeds and in this article I am going to cover what I think he could bring to this Leeds team and how.

Leeds like to get the ball up the pitch quickly with direct balls from the defence out to the wingers. It does seem to be a common trend that Leeds are heavily reliant on this wing-play and their wingers who enable it.

The first example of these moves I looked at was when Leeds beat West Ham 3–2 at the London Stadium. I want to look in particular at the first goal Leeds scored.

As we see here the move is started when Luke Ayling holds onto the ball and launches a direct long ball to the right wing.

The ball reaches Raphinha who beats Coufal and begins to speed into the box to the by-line before cutting the ball back which eventually leads to a goal for Harrison.

So, what we see here is that Leeds move was successful and a lot of their wing play moves are. However, sometimes these moves are tried to be created through the middle and have proved much less effective.

A good example of this happening was in Leeds’s most recent fixture against Newcastle at Elland Road when Leeds lost 1–0.

As we see here Struijk starts the move with a low direct pass into the left half space for Rodrigo to run on to. This pass almost doesn’t come off due to it being into space and rather directly to a player. Here, Klich or Rodrigo should drop deeper or into the half space to give Struijk an easier pass.

Luckily for Leeds in this case Rodrigo manages to beat the defender to the ball. This actually then sets Leeds off on a promising attack with an opposition centre back out of position and a 4 on 3 in Newcastle’s final third.

Even though this makes for a great chance at getting into the box and scoring for Leeds it doesn’t come to fruition on this occasion as Rodrigo over hits his pass for Dan James- maybe Aaronson could’ve placed it better.

So, now let’s move on to how Aaronson can fit what Leeds are needing.

I’ve done my best to watch a good number of Salzburg’s champions league games to have a bit of an eye-test on Aaronson and see what he can do at a high-level of football. However, we can first take a quick look at some of his stats.

Leeds like to get the ball forward quickly through direct, line-breaking progressive passes out to the wingers. This is an area Aaronson can excel at as he is in the 77th percentile for progressive passes received according to StatsBomb via FBRef. Aaronson is on average receiving 7.3 progressive passes per game. If Aaronson can stick to his ways of dropping deep to receive or dropping in and out of the half spaces to create options, then he can certainly keep up these numbers at Leeds which could really help to create more attacking chances for them.

Now let’s take a look at how Aaronson actually performs these movements on the pitch. I’ll be using Salzburg’s 1–0 win over Sevilla in the Champions League at the Red Bull Arena as an example.

So here we see that Salzburg have just won the ball back from a 50/50 challenge and Aaronson is fairly stationary in the central lane of the pitch being loosely marked by a Sevilla player.

In the next image we can see that Aaronson has now come over to the left-hand side into the left half-space to give his teammate a better option that could lead to a dangerous attack through the half space.

Now we see that Aaronson has received the ball due to his smart off the ball movement to give a better passing option. With the ball he drives forward well at pace as he assesses his options before playing a perfectly weighted through ball right to the feet of Karim Adeyemi out on the left wing as shows below.

Adeyemi receives the ball and then crosses into the box which leads to a goal.

This is why Aaronson could most definitely be a key piece of the puzzle for Bielsa in this current Leeds team. Whilst it seems the possibility of a deadline day move for the youngster is completely off it does seem Leeds hold an interest in signing the player next Summer so there’s still a good chance Aaronson may find himself at Elland Road in the near future.