I wanted to be Newcastle’s answer to Raheem Sterling – now I’m in non-league at 29 after a spell in Slovenia

Plenty of promising players fail to make the grade in the Premier League for one reason or another. Few of them take their talents to Slovenia once opportunities dry up in England, however.

Rolando Aarons’ career path has not quite progressed as expected. A decade ago, he was a thrilling teenage talent making his way through the ranks at Newcastle United, earning comparisons to Raheem Sterling along the way – but now, at 29, he’s dropped down to non-league after signing for his ninth club. But what happened to the winger, and how did he wind up playing in five different countries, winning a national championship in one along the way?

What happened to former Newcastle starlet Rolando Aarons?

Aarons made his Premier League debut in August 2014, and scored his first senior goal against Crystal Palace two weeks later - it looked for all the world like he was destined for big things.

The early reviews were raves. Shortly after that first goal, The Daily Mail compared him to Sterling – a player that Aarons greatly admired, calling him “an inspiration and a friend” in one interview with The Athletic. Even if one can’t be entirely sure that the Mail intended that as a complement, given some of the stories they’ve run about Sterling over the past decade, it was clear that much was expected of the Jamaica-born youngster.

As is so often the case with careers that didn’t quite go according to plan, injuries were largely to blame. There were repeated hamstring problems, a foot injury, and – worst of all – a ruptured ACL which required surgery.

“I broke down a few times,” he later said in that same interview with The Athletic. “During my first season, I called my mum and cried down the phone after my hamstring injuries. Then, after my ACL operation, I ran a bath and couldn’t physically get into the tub. I just wept, thinking, ‘I’m the most unlucky footballer in the world.’ I felt helpless. I got into a dark place, mentally. I didn’t know anyone else who’d been through that experience so I was trying to do it all myself.”

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By the time that Rafa Benítez was installed as Newcastle manager, Aarons had been almost completely sidelined and a grind through a series of loan spells followed. Sheffield Wednesday, Motherwell and Wycombe Wanderers were the more standard destinations, but Aarons demonstrated an adventurous streak, joining both Serie A side Hellas Verona (with whom he was relegated) and Czech outfit Slovan Liberec for brief spells.

As well as injuries, an unfortunate and seemingly somewhat undeserved reputation for off-field issues curtailed his opportunities. Aarons was arrested for his part in a brawl outside a Newcastle cocktail bar in 2016 and was subsequently handed a suspended jail sentence and a community service order after pleading guilty to affray. The then 20-year-old had made a serious mistake, but it perhaps belied the true nature of a young man who spent much of his free time attending Spanish and Italian classes to feed his passion for modern languages.

By the time that he was released by Newcastle in 2021, however, it was the persistent injuries that were putting the biggest dampener on his progress. Two years at Huddersfield Town went nowhere fast, even if he did earn his only two caps for Jamaica in 2022, while a second loan spell with Motherwell was cut short after yet another injury.

It took months for Aarons to find his next club – but he eventually found himself playing in Slovenia with NK Celje, winning the PrvaLiga and his first major trophy in the process. That experiment has now come to an end as well, however, and lingering fitness concerns didn’t make finding another club easy.

What next for Aarons after Slovenian adventure?

By his own admission, the idea of playing abroad for a competitive team in a less glamorous league had more appeal than a stint on the lower rungs of the EFL ladder or in non-league – abut after taking another crack at establishing himself in another distant footballing outpost, he has now chosen to make a fresh start in the National League, the fifth tier of English football.

In June, Aarons had a trial with Dinamo Tblisi, one of the traditional giants of Georgian football, although he does not appear to have been able to agree terms with the Eastern European outfit. It may have been something of a disappointment for the polyglot wideman, based on past comments.

“When you go and drop down the leagues… you don't feel that thing that you get from playing football - the reason you started - to play with emotion and to win things,” Aarons told The Newcastle Chronicle in 2024.

“I didn't have any clue about [Celje] to be honest… but when I saw they were top of the league and I could win a league title and go into European competitions, why on earth would I go to League One or League Two when I have an option to maybe play against some of the best teams in the world and possible win trophies? I’m just enjoying playing football again.”

Still, Aarons clearly didn’t entirely dismiss the concept of a return to England, given that he played in a PFA trials match earlier this summer alongside players such as Ravel Morrison and Angus Gunn, who has since signed for Nottingham Forest - and now, he has found his new team, after signing with non-league Morecambe Town, a club who have been through a fair amount of turmoil themselves in recent years, on Monday.

All those injury worries perhaps made it tougher to convince a club to take a chance on him, even if his overblown ‘bad boy’ reputation seems to have rightly fallen by the wayside. Aarons may not have had lived up to the Sterling comparisons or realised his early potential in many ways, but he seems to have found a path towards career fulfilment nonetheless. Morecambe may not be Slovenia or Georgia, but hopefully he’ll find plenty to challenge him on the Lancashire coast.