Given that his team have only played a handful of times in the last four months, the rise of Gio Reyna has been startling. With the usual Winterpause and the unusual coronavirus shutdown, Borussia Dortmund have taken part in just over 900 minutes of competitive football this year – 7 Bundesliga games, a two-legged Champions League knockout tie and a DFB-Pokal match.
And yet one of the key themes of those 10 games – indeed of German football this decade, given how it has necessarily stalled in these exceptional circumstances – has been the emergence of the 17-year-old star. His wasn’t exactly an unheralded talent – a teenage move from New York City FC (complete with glowing references from Patrick Vieira) to a European footballing superpower is hardly a journeyman’s career trajectory. But success is never inevitable, and plenty of unstoppable juniors have failed to impress at a senior level (remember Freddy Adu?).
The twin highpoints of his career to date – a dreamy, Gourcuff-esque shimmy and shot in a cup victory against Werder Bremen and an incisive pass to set up Erling Haaland against PSG – have been all the more arresting because Reyna’s baggy shorts and shirt look like they belong to someone in a higher age category.
Reyna is what the tabloids call ‘footballing royalty’, the progeny of US national soccer stars Claudio Reyna and Danielle Egan. Reyna Sr. is well known to most British fans – most notably for his role in a thrilling, early renaissance Manchester City side under Stuart Pearce. Indeed, Gio was born in Sunderland – of all places – while his father was playing at the Stadium of Light. This may make him the city’s most coveted export since Jordan Henderson (a crown only recently contested).
Reyna Sr. started his career in Germany, with stints at Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg. And his son’s eligibility for a Portuguese passport – via his grandmother – has enabled him to do the same. In fact, Reyna Jr. could have played national football for his pick of Argentina, England, Portugal or the USA. As he confirmed recently, it’s the Stars and Stripes who stand to profit. Reyna has already had international success, guiding the Americans’ under-15 team to victory at the much vaunted Torneo delle Nazioni with a series of outstanding performances. Can he repeat the trick at a senior level in years to come?
There can be little doubt that Reyna is in the right place to develop his abilities. At a club renowned for nurturing young players (and with a manager in Lucien Favre who seems content to throw teenagers a black-and-yellow jersey and see how they get on), there is a clear pathway for him to follow.
His countryman Christian Pulisic – who fell in love with the game while training with Brackley Town’s junior teams during a year in Oxfordshire at the age of 7 – also moved to Dortmund as a teenager. He became the youngest American to play in the Bundesliga, a record which Reyna has now broken. It looks like the coronavirus shutdown may stop Reyna breaking his record of being the youngest American to score in the Bundesliga.
Will Reyna eventually follow in Pulisic’s footsteps and secure a big money move to the Premier League? If his star continues to rise, you can imagine the Netflix content team licking their lips at the prospect of a romantic Gio return to the city of his birth for a new series of Sunderland ‘Til I Die. Unfortunately for Sunderland fans, they can only dream of attracting Reyna-like talent while in their current predicament. When the footballing world springs back into action, Reyna has happier stories to write.
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