Philadelphia Union owner Richie Graham talks about the sale of Brendan Aaronson and future of American soccer

Philadelphia Union co-owner Richie Graham talks about the future of soccer, and the club’s big sale of a young talent.

Last week MLS side Philadelphia Union — in the middle of an extremely successful campaign which has them tied for first place in the Eastern Conference — announced that its 20-year-old attacking midfielder Brenden Aaronson had been sold to Austrian side Red Bull Salzburg, and would join the club after the season.

The reported figure of the sale was $6 million plus bonuses, the largest ever paid for an MLS Homegrown Player. For the Union, the sale was proof of concept for its strategy over the past few years of focusing on the development of its academy.

In a phone call with FTW, Philadelphia Union co-owner Richie Graham talked about the sale, the changing perception of MLS and American players in Europe, and his vision for youth development in this country.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FTW: Congratulations on this sale. And I should say the fact that I’m even saying congratulations, and this is something that is being celebrated — not just internally, but externally with the marketing around it — is something that feels new. I’m not sure 10 years ago in MLS people would be making a big deal of a young player being sold to a bigger club. Do you think that’s changed?

Richie Graham: Yeah, no, I think it’s a fair point. However, if you look at the evolution of MLS over the last 25 years, the first 10 years there was a lot of focus and energy on issues like building stadiums and putting first teams in place.

As the league has evolved, they’ve grown and began to deploy capital, focus, resources and energy into other places. Ten years ago, there were a few MLS academies, but not not nearly the level of focus and energy today. Today, MLS is probably investing over 50, 60 million annually, into their academy programs. They just also taken on, as you know, MLS Next, which is a massive undertaking focused on the grassroots. And so that’s kind of part of the natural evolution.

With that investment into academies, you’re now beginning to see some incredible results, not just for Philadelphia Union, but across the league. And I think that bodes very, very well for the league.

North America is a massive, massive talent pool, which is a bit underserved, if you will, in terms of the global market. So there’s big opportunities for young players here and for MLS to sort of be able to identify this player at a young age and put them in a good environment, put them into MLS, showcase them, and then ultimately transact on to them if they head overseas. That’s a great business model for for MLS.

FTW: We are now seeing major European clubs take chances on young American and Canadian players in a way that we haven’t really seen before. Do you think that this is a result of changing perceptions in Europe? Or is it a result of the quality of play from our young players is just much higher right now? 

RG: I think it’s both.

Regarding MLS, I think that it’s producing young players and the number of Americans that are doing well over in Europe right now, in the Champions League, that certainly helps.

I would say that with the early pioneers, you think about guys like Claudio Reyna, that had to really go carve out their own path over there. They were probably walking into locker rooms where there wasn’t a lot of belief, and they had to fight for their position. Guys like Clint Dempsey, they had to fight for everything they ever got.

And so that generation started it, and this group that’s coming through now is kind of riding on that a little bit. I think that the perception of the American player is going up, but also the standard of the average player in our country is going up at every level. Whether you go down to the grassroots, U-12 all the way up to MLS, it’s improving.

I like to think about like we’re investing in player development, and we’re doing it with the wind at your back, or you’re swimming with the tide. The level is getting better and better. So I do think it’s both.

FTW: Watching your team over the last couple years, it’s clear you have a very defined playing style from top to bottom of the organization, from the first team down to the kids. When it comes to playing style, how do you marry that with youth development? How much did youth development factor into the playing style that you guys settled on?

RG: We sat back probably six or eight years ago and came up with a competitive strategy.

Thinking through: How are we going to compete in MLS? Well, we knew we were not necessarily going to be able to overpower and outspend some of our competition. In terms of chasing big, big name players, it just wasn’t something we necessarily believed in.

We have three pillars to our competitive strategy. Pillar number one is: Let’s be a club that really emphasizes its academy and player development system. If we can’t buy them, let’s build them. And let’s really look at models from around the world where we can bring in some of those ideas.

Second was looking at being a methodology club. In other words, having a cohesive style of play and strategy that you’re teaching from the very first moments kids come into your academy program, all the way up to the first team.

Our third pillar was the idea of trying to find innovation.

We believe we’re doing number one and number two pretty well. We’re working on number three, in terms of innovation.

But when it comes to methodology, in terms of player development, that comes when you have a clear picture of how you want to play. That then informs all your decisions and your your scouting and, and sort of what you’re trying to manufacture.

If you think of the academy and our second team as a manufacturing plant, the methodology gives us coaches and trainers and then the athletes have very clear specifications of what product they’re trying to manufacture in that plant. And the tighter you have understanding of what you’re trying to make, in terms of a product, the more successful you can be in making that product.

And what you’re getting is hopefully, years from now, when Brendan’s younger brother, Paxton, jumps on the field, he’s got that two, three years of having played that system already under his belt.

And he instinctively knows it. And again, you’ve seen this in great clubs, like when Barcelona was at its best. And guys were jumping on to the first team, people were like, “Oh, gosh, it looks like he’s played that position forever.” Well, yes. He came up through the system.

FTW: When it comes to American youth development, I’ve seen sort of two competing theories. One is you try and get to players young, get them into an academy. The competing theory argues that, with a country of our size, that’s impossible. There are too many kids spread too far apart. So all you can really do is focus on spreading the gospel, having the game infiltrate the country and trying to create spaces where people can connect with it or play.

RG: Yeah.

FTW: Is For Soccer Ventures [Graham’s media company that partners with brands in the soccer space] your attempt at squaring that circle? For young people you can’t reach through an academy system, is the hope that you can still reach them through other means?

RG: Yeah, no, I think that’s a kind of a key idea there for us.

If you think about the sport of soccer in the United States, it’s growing, and  it’s becoming more and more relevant right over time. So the question is: How do we make it more relevant? How do we accelerate the growth of the sport?

One way that we could do that is we could produce a superstar like Messi, a top one and two or three in the world world type of player that started out in some little town in the USA, did grassroots soccer, then went to an MLS Academy, played in MLS, and then went to Europe and dominated. That superstar would obviously take some of the people that are maybe on the fringes of the sport, that don’t know much about it, and pull them in. Think about a Michael Jordan, or a Yao Ming, and what happened with the NBA and China with basketball. Right?

Then there’s this other thing, which is the story of soccer, the marketing soccer, how’s it cool. How it lives at the intersection between fashion, music,
pop culture, and sport.

Again, the NBA does a really good job of that, where there’s a lot of fun things and cool things that are happening around the sport. For Soccer Ventures wants to shine a light on both of those elements.

And I feel if we can do both of those things, if we can make soccer more hip, more relevant, more cool, you know, you’re also going to pull people towards the sport. And the sport sells itself.

By the way, this is a pretty important decade to to invest in soccer, because we’re looking at 2026. And thinking this is going to be a massive, massive economic impact to the to the game here in this country, with the World Cup. We’ve got the World Cup, you get the Olympics and potentially the Women’s World Cup. So you get a lot of things happen in this decade.

We think this is the time to sort of go invest and both of those areas on the product player development side and also on the marketing brand side. If we do both of those well, do we we believe we can help to accelerate the relevancy of the sport. That’s our guiding North star, it’s all about American soccer and driving American soccer. And that’s my passion.