CHESTER — Though there was a moment or two where the doubt crept in for Jeremy Rafanello, he can see now with the relative sagacity of a 25-year-old.
It could crop up while the midfielder watched yet another game from the bench in a seven-month stint with Danish club Helsingor without getting into a competitive match.
It could appear while sharing a house with two fellow Americans and two Canadians just across the Oresund strait from Sweden.
It certainly crested when he and his dad hopped in the car to drive to an open tryout for USL Championship squad Indy Eleven in January 2020, with nothing more guaranteed the 19-year-old who should’ve been a sophomore at Penn State than a chance to show his wares.
From the vantage point of his fourth season with the Philadelphia Union, though, it all seems exactly how it should have been for the Delran, N.J., native. His waylaid Homegrown journey to becoming a regular contributor for the Union undeniably owes to the Scandinavian adventure that began his career.
“Being able to learn and then come back to the U.S. afterwards and take my experiences that I learned and bring it over here was an experience that I can say that was probably the most entertaining part of my career,” Rafanello said. “And I wouldn’t change it, that’s for sure.”
It wasn’t quite a whim, but it was a chance that Rafanello had to take. It was the summer of 2019.
Rafanello had wrapped up his freshman year at Penn State, where he’d made 15 starts, scored three goals and been a Big Ten All-Freshman selection in the fall of 2018. Helsignor, a club that had fallen on hard times, had new American owners, led by chairman Jordan Gardner. They’d suffered consecutive relegations, from the SuperLiga to the third-tier 2.Division. (The most rotten thing in the city also known as Elsinore where Shakespeare set Hamlet are Danish soccer’s naming conventions).
Gardner’s staff wanted to bring over North Americans to both build interest stateside and as an easy talent acquisition mechanism.
Rafanello was one of about a dozen to audition, and he made the cut. None of the five – which includes eventual FC Cincinnati player Zico Bailey and former Chivas USA product Chris Cortez, who joined later in the year – ever appeared in a first-team match.
But to Rafanello, the experience was irreplaceable.
“It was an experience in itself,” he said. “I was 19 years old, so first time really living away from home, six-hour flight away. It was a cool experience being able to see the way that they trained. They were a SuperLiga club two years before I got there, and then they got relegated twice, which was unfortunate, but there were still all the SuperLiga guys on the squad.”
There were tradeoffs.
What Rafanello lost in game minutes, he made up for in training intensity, against veterans a decade his senior. He could’ve stayed at Penn State and been a star, could’ve augmented summers with developmental club Reading United, could’ve found his way to Union II earlier.
Instead, he went nearly 14 months — thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic delaying his Indy Eleven debut until July — between competitive matches.
But learning to survive in a novel environment shaped him just as much, he thinks, as more conventional pathways could have.
“I think the training level was an experience in itself,” he said. “Especially where I was at my career, I think coming out of college and then learning from guys who played in the SuperLiga and talking to them and experiencing a professional life outside of soccer, how to manage yourself and sort of the Danish way of living, is a thing that I brought back with me. I think that was the biggest thing.”
Even without an appearance, he left Denmark happy and changed.
He still keeps in contact with former teammates, and he celebrated from his apartment in Indianapolis when Helsingor was promoted to the 1.Division (the second tier) in 2020. Though the acquisitions didn’t work out as either party had hoped, Rafanello said the club, “helped us out with anything that we needed,” which included scheduling friendly matches to get the reserves a run.
The steps on his career path are easier to see now that he’s traversed them.
From the tryout with Indy, he established himself as a young player on a veteran squad in 2020. That translated into a deal with New York Red Bulls II, where he became a captain. After wrangling over his Homegrown rights, he returned to the Union in 2022, having spent his high school years at FC Delco and the Union Academy and played in 2018 for Bethlehem Steel.
Over the last two years, Rafanello has made 24 league appearances.
After four starts and 11 games totaling 321 minutes last year for a team more burdened by a heavy schedule, Rafanello has played 258 minutes this year, in 13 league appearances and two starts. The former U.S. Under-19 international carved out a niche as a late-game closer: The Union are 10-2-1 in games in which he appears.
Wherever the different pathway might have taken him, Rafanello is certain that he’s more prepared to succeed now because of his Danish interlude. He happens to be on a team with a number of players that have played in Denmark and Norway, his familiarity with those cultures “a foot in the door” for getting to know teammates. And he applies a number of off-field lessons to his daily routine.
“I think on a quality-of-life level, it’s how I try to carry myself, with the Danish culture, of how they live their life compared to how a lot of Americans live their life,” he said. “I think it’s something that Americans could definitely take a little bit more of.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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