'All I care about' - the telling truth Leeds United escapee needs to learn after giving his side

Last season was Aaronson's first in English football and he arrived nice and early, at the back end of May 2022, fresh-faced and excited for the new challenge. His first set of interviews with the media took place in the press room under the West Stand and there was no escaping just how young and slight a figure he presented. If he looked like a kid it's because he was one, aged just 21, and blissfully unaware of the horrors to come in the season ahead. The question of Premier League physicality was a natural one to put to a player of Aaronson's stature and as he answered it with a reminder of his Champions League experience he was given a thumbs up by a Leeds employee in the room. That question had obviously been anticipated, perhaps even prepared for. But in the Premier League talking a good game and playing one are very different sports.

Rehashing how badly it went for Aaronson and Leeds, and for Aaronson at Leeds, is a largely pointless exercise, however it was interesting to get his perspective on it in an interview with The Athletic. Regardless of his lack of time with the club, he was not immune from the stress and bitter disappointment that engulfed Elland Road as a relegation battle took hold and refused to let go. He got in his own head about the lack of end product and found it difficult to keep self-created pressure from weighing him down. The haunted look that came over the youngster and various others on the final day, when the battle was lost definitively, made it difficult to take seriously any suggestion that he did not care about relegation. What he admits to not caring about, though, is what people said and wrote about him.

“The good things and the bad things I don’t want to know about — I don’t care,” Aaronson told The Athletic. “All I care about is my dad’s opinion, my agent’s opinion, and my inner circle and, of course, the coach.”

In today's world of brutal social media hot takes, it's probably wise for young players to insulate themselves from opinions that likely won't contribute to their form or help their mental health. Later in the interview, though, Aaronson's comments showed an awareness of some of the criticism levelled at him last season when it came to physicality, or the perceived lack of it, in his game.

He said: "During parts of the season last year, I was trying to draw fouls around the box and people thought, ‘Oh, he’s going down too easy’. But that was just me trying to get fouls." The problem people had with that specific aspect of Aaronson's play was that he too often failed to win a free-kick, surrendered possession and was left on the deck as the opposition went about their business.

A point he makes about the best players in the world not being the biggest is balanced by his spending more time lifting weights since last year and a desire to get stronger. There's no getting away from the fact that he would have to be a lot stronger if he was ever to make it in the Premier League. And that brings us back to Leeds, where Aaronson can still see a future for himself.

“For sure, it’s possible," he said. "It’s not done and dusted or anything like that. I love the club. I love the guys that I was there with, the connections I made. It was just tough the way it ended."

That view was met with a huge dose of scepticism among the Leeds fanbase, for reasons that Aaronson's interview touched upon but did not fully seem to understand. The going got tough for the club, they were relegated and players hightailed it out of Elland Road. Aaronson was one of the first to exercise a clause in his contract that permitted a loan move away from Leeds in the event of relegation and his reason was simple: "I felt like this was the best decision that I could make — playing in the Bundesliga and playing in the Champions League — to help my career and get me better. So that’s why I made the decision.” What he did not say was whether or not the success of Leeds United ever entered his thinking. What he can no longer say, not with with a straight face anyway, is the Leeds United motto 'side before self every time.'

Leeds boss Daniel Farke said recently that he harbours no ill-will against players who wanted to leave in the summer because careers are short and that is something that supporters of all clubs can struggle to accept and understand. There is rarely, if ever, any loyalty shown by fans or club decision makers to players who fail to meet the expected standards - no one laments the departure of a striker who never scores or an injury or error-prone flop - so asking for or expecting loyalty is a little on the hypocritical side.

But by the same token, what Aaronson and the other summer '23 leavers need to accept and understand is that fans are loyal to their club and if someone actively goes out of their way to escape that club then there is unlikely to ever be a welcome mat rolled out if they suddenly decide they actually quite fancy a return. The most telling part of Aaronson's interview is that admission that he did what he believed to be the best thing for him, not Leeds, and took up Union Berlin on their offer of an escape route. Fans might not be entitled to demand loyalty from him but they are entitled to decide they don't want to see that player again. Second chances are a privilege, not a right, so whether or not Aaronson listens to the noise or reads social media, he must realise that even if he wants to come back, the fans might not want him to.

Club captain Liam Cooper turned the dressing room air blue at the end of last season with words to the effect that if you didn't want to be at Leeds then you should feel free to make yourself scarce. Supporters adopted the same position and it's hard, if not impossible, to see that changing any time soon.