CINCINNATI — On the final day of the Premier League season, Brenden Aaronson was with his girlfriend in a Vienna cafe watching Leeds United attempt to avoid relegation to England’s second division.
Leeds’s survival May 22 would trigger his transfer — the second-largest in U.S. history — to the West Yorkshire club next season. Failure would leave him with RB Salzburg in Austria, where he had thrived for two years after leaving MLS’s Philadelphia Union.
While Aaronson stared at the TV, his girlfriend provided updates about Burnley’s match against Newcastle. Regardless of Leeds’s result at Brentford, a Burnley victory at home would doom Leeds’s — and his — Premier League hopes.