Gio Reyna looked serene, or maybe it was just the carefully cultivated light and airiness bouncing off him in Peleton’s Manhattan headquarters, where we had met up for an interview last summer. Either way, he was healthy and happy for the first time in a while, after his half-season loan to Nottingham Forest had been a bust. He was still only 21 but seemed to have matured. He had just gotten engaged. The beef with US national team coach Gregg Berhalter was behind him – that whole sordid deal when Gio’s parents sparked a civil war within American soccer with ugly allegations against Berhalter around the 2022 World Cup.
He had dazzled, finally reemerging as the Reyna of old, at the Concacaf Nations League Finals in March, where he was named player of the tournament after guiding the US to a third straight title. He seemed perfectly positioned to make his mark on the Copa América. Instead the tournament turned into a debacle for the US. Reyna played plenty, but the host country eventually faced a group-stage elimination-cum-humiliation.
Nine months later, Reyna is back to the same place where he has spent so much of his five years as a first-team professional: playing marginal minutes at Borussia Dortmund. At a big club, but not quite big-time. Almost breaking through but never exactly getting the timing or the opportunities right. Threatening to become, as the Dutch call it, an “eternal prospect.”
Remember the 2020-21 season, when Reyna, who turned 18 that year, formed an effervescent foursome of forwards with a few other hot prospects? Those colleagues: Jude Bellingham, Erling Haaland and Jadon Sancho. That feels like a long time ago.
On Saturday, Reyna substituted into Dortmund’s dreary 2-1 loss to Stuttgart in the 85th minute, just before Julian Ryerson was sent off and reduced the home side to 10 men. Reyna had six touches in the late chaos as he and his teammates desperately tried to arrest their downward spiral. This came a week after his previous appearance, when he played all of four minutes and communed with the ball only four times after coming on in the 88th minute at Heidenheim. He has made just one Bundesliga start this season and logged 175 minutes – on a team that has faceplanted to 11th place with a what-is-gong-on-here goal difference of +1.
On Tuesday, in Dortmund’s 3-0 dismantling of Sporting in the first leg of their Champions League knockout phase playoffs, Reyna didn’t play at all. He was seen jogging along the sideline and joining in on the goal celebrations of others.
Time is a flat circle, it seems. A flash of brilliance. An injury. A dearth of playing time. And on and on. But the connective tissue in his still-pretty-young career has been less untapped potential than plain bad luck. If there were some advanced metric that correlated talent to misfortune, Reyna might be one of the world’s leading players in the category – enough that we might call this new stat xGio.
Over the course of the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons alone, Reyna missed 386 days to 10 different injuries – more than a year in all. The start of his 2023-24 season was derailed by a hairline fracture in his fibula that cost him the first month of the season. This season, a groin strain ruled him out from early September through late November, a 13-game stretch. It’s become something of a tradition: spending the fall, and the crucial opening months of the new campaign, beset by injuries.
The upshot is as predictable as the cadence of muscle problems – because other than the break in his shin, Reyna’s injuries tend to be hamstring or groin issues. By the time Reyna is back to full fitness, he is buried deep down the depth chart in all of the various attacking positions he can play, since Dortmund develop wingers and attacking midfielders on an industrial scale. If he has a role at all, it’s most often been as a super sub. The most minutes Reyna has played for Dortmund since his high mark of 2,698 minutes in 2020-21 is a mere 1,016 minutes, back in 2022-23.
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All of this may have been less to do with Reyna himself than his simply getting sucked down into the muck of Dortmund’s incurable fecklessness. In the five years and a few weeks since Reyna made his Bundesliga debut, Dortmund have made six managerial changes – tellingly appointing Edin Terzić ad interim once and permanently twice. Judging from his first two matches in charge, Niko Kovač, the new man in charge, isn’t inclined to lean heavily on Reyna just yet.
It’s the same kind of unfortunate timing that fairly ruined Reyna’s first World Cup. In all that time he was out injured, Christian Pulisic and Tim Weah established themselves as Berhalter’s nailed-down starters on the wings. Meanwhile, the midfield trio of Weston McKennie, Yunus Musah and Tyler Adams became so coherent and incontrovertible that it earned a collective nickname, MMA. Midfields with a moniker don’t get broken up. Reyna was left out of the lineup for the business end of that cycle. His frustration at the World Cup turned to petulance, which unleashed all that drama.
Coaches tend to come around to Reyna eventually. Kovač may yet. But until such a time, Reyna appears to be the wrong man at the wrong place and the wrong time, having to start over. Again.
Article by:Source: Leander Schaerlaeckens
