If Giovanni Reyna makes it big, if the Borussia Dortmund winger fully realises his considerable potential, we’ll probably point back to February 2020 as the start of his emergence.
Two snapshots — one fantastic goal, one high-profile assist — could eventually be considered the moments when the 17-year-old scion of American soccer royalty began to make the throne his own.
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The goal came from nothing. Just a simple backpass late in a German Cup loss at Werder Bremen on February 4. Reyna received the ball on the left flank, quickly sidestepped one defender, glided past another and cut in to dodge a third. Still only on the edge of the penalty area, he audaciously went for goal, wrapping his right foot around the ball and contorting it — “curling” isn’t accurate; the shot was too violent — into the top corner.
Giovanni Reyna becomes the youngest goalscorer in #DFBPokal history, and it's a strike the American will remember for a long time ✨ pic.twitter.com/YQPLihzq5l
— The DFB-Pokal (@DFBPokal_EN) February 4, 2020
Two weeks later, there was the assist. This move was less to do with Reyna, and more to do with his team-mate and fellow wonderkid Erling Haaland.
Reyna played his part, however, finding a pocket of space on the right flank, driving toward goal and picking out the Norwegian striker, who, with the power befitting a Norse god, hammered home from 25 yards out. The goal gave Dortmund a 2-1 victory in the first leg of their Champions League round of 16 tie against Paris Saint-Germain, though the Parisians would advance after a 2-0 win in the return at Parc des Princes. The tournament has since been suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In both moments, Reyna flashed the talent — dribbling skill, speed, awareness and finishing ability — that has made him one of the top prospects in global football, and the newest big hope for the U.S. national team.
Of course, two moments, no matter how impressive, don’t tell his whole story. Not even close.
The Reyna family held a distinguished place in American soccer long before Gio was born.
His father, Claudio, now the sporting director for incoming Major League Soccer expansion team Austin FC, is one of the best U.S. internationals of all time. He was part of four World Cup squads and was named in the team of the tournament after he captained the U.S. to the quarter-finals in 2002. Gio’s mother, Danielle Egan, won national titles in all four of her seasons at the University of North Carolina, where she played alongside legends Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, and earned six caps for the U.S. in 1993.
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After the 1994 World Cup, Claudio signed with Bayer Leverkusen and Danielle went to Germany with him. In 1999, shortly after Claudio moved to Scottish club Rangers, the couple had their first child, a boy named Jack. Gio was born three years later, during Claudio’s brief stint at Sunderland in England. The couple then had another boy, Joah-Mikel, in 2007; a baby girl, Carolina, followed two years later.
By the time Carolina was born, the Reynas were back in the States. Claudio ended a four-year spell with Manchester City in January 2007 to return to the New York area, where he and Danielle both grew up, and he signed for MLS club New York Red Bulls. Injuries forced him to retire midway through the 2008 season but with four kids and his new job as U.S. Soccer’s youth technical director, there wasn’t exactly a shortage of activity around the Reyna household.
Unsurprisingly, much of that activity revolved around sports. Jack and Gio were perpetually in motion, constantly playing soccer, American football, basketball, tennis — basically anything involving a ball — at the family’s Bedford, New York home. Despite being three years younger, Gio always jumped in with Jack and his friends in their backyard games. Those sessions became something of a crucible for Gio, who had to quickly learn how to harness his unique physical gifts in order to compete with the older boys.
“That was probably the main reason Gio is the player he is today,” Claudio tells The Athletic. “It’s not me; I saw him always chasing (Jack), wanting to beat him, wanting to do everything with him. I was sitting back and he was off with his own personal kind of coach, his own person that he was following.”
Even in those early days, Gio was a superlative athlete — taller, faster and stronger than his peers. But apart from his physical gifts, his early childhood wasn’t all that atypical. He was, as Claudio puts it, “a normal American kid” in a normal, yet supremely athletic, American family.
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Tragically, the Reynas’ normalcy was upended in May 2010 when, at the age of 11, Jack was diagnosed with stage IV glioblastoma; a rare, aggressive form of brain cancer. He fought the disease and went into remission in April 2011, but it came back that December. By then, it was too advanced for doctors to do anything but delay.
Jack passed away at age 13 on July 19, 2012, surrounded by loved ones.
The pain becomes more manageable but the grief of losing a child never goes away. There are too many holes, too many cruel, unanswerable questions about what Jack’s future may have held.
It’s unfair to project those questions onto a sibling. Gio loved Jack — he loves Jack — but he’s becoming his own man. He has his own dreams, his own problems and his own way of handling them. He carries memories of his older brother with him, but his journey is his own, not a facsimile of what Jack’s might have been.
“Certainly, it’s a part of a Gio,” says Claudio. “It’s one of the things that I think we all know, but that we don’t talk about all the time. It’s just what brings us together, and even closer, as part of all of these milestones that we’re all going through — not just Gio, as a family — that he’s with us… Gio has a tattoo that he got with Jack on it. His first one. He went with his mother to go get it. He carries him everywhere, and it’s certainly part of the reason why he is as mature as he is, because of what he’s dealt with.”
On the field, each step of Gio’s journey — from those backyard games with his big brother to swapping jerseys with PSG star Kylian Mbappe in the Champions League — has been incredibly impressive. It began in earnest in 2015 when Gio, then 12, was a part of New York City FC’s first academy team. Claudio was at that point the club’s sporting director in its inaugural MLS season. Gio stood apart right away, scoring the opening goal and recording a hat-trick in the academy’s first competitive match.
He continued in that vein for the next few years, scoring, creating, growing into his body and developing into a promising prospect. An early milestone came in the spring of 2016, with the U.S. Under-15 team at a tournament in Rosario, Argentina. Claudio, Danielle and Claudio’s parents, Maria and Miguel — who grew up in Argentina and played professionally there — travelled with Gio for the competition, and saw him score a wonderful goal in a 2-0 win against Uruguay.
“Technically, he was very good,” says Dave van den Bergh, then head coach of the under-15 national team and now an assistant with MLS club New England Revolution. “His reading of the game is incredible. He knows where to ask for the ball, when to ask for the ball, how to ask for the ball — all those things combined set him apart. And then his technical ability, his speed and his one-v-one skills, that were always there, could then take over. He could impact the game, no matter the opponent, no matter how the opponent played and no matter how tight they marked him. And, literally, he impacted every game that we played with that team.”
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Reyna was good in that tournament in Argentina, but he didn’t yet have the commanding presence he would later develop. Van den Bergh said he seemed a little “tentative” in Rosario. That fit with his personality. According to dad Claudio and 17-year-old New York City defender Joe Scally, one of Gio’s best friends and a team-mate in New York City’s academy and with U.S. youth national teams, Gio is relatively shy in new environments. He takes a moment to settle in with a group, then, once he feels comfortable, becomes a gregarious, funny (Scally called him the “most hilarious” person he’s ever met), somewhat outspoken leader.
That side of him fully emerged over the course of a few remarkable weeks in April and May 2017. Still only 14, Gio led New York City Under-16s to the Generation Adidas Cup Premier Division title in Texas, a prestigious youth tournament featuring the top MLS academies and teams from around the world. He was named the competition’s top player.
GOOOOOOAL #NYCFC! Gio Reyna puts U16s up 1-0 in extra time! #ComeOnNewYork pic.twitter.com/QjbqAnSDJj
— New York City FC (@NYCFC) April 16, 2017
Immediately after winning the cup, he flew to Italy to meet up with the U.S. Under-15s for the Torneo Della Nazione. He captained the U.S. and recorded four goals and four assists in five games, including their late winner in a 2-1 victory over England in the final.
“He was always a leader on the field in the sense that he was so good, but it didn’t really take off until we had gone over to Europe,” says Van den Bergh. “He was just very, very good. He had definitely stepped it up by that point. I saw glimpses of the player he could become in Argentina, but it emerged when he was in Europe… All those games, he was impactful and he was important and he carried the team.”
During the Generation Adidas Cup, Scally remembers excitedly talking with Gio about the college scouts who were in attendance, joking about whether he preferred his mother’s alma mater North Carolina or the University of Virginia, where Claudio starred in the early 1990s. But Gio’s performances in Texas and Italy quickly ended any discussions about college. He was now firmly on the radar of European clubs.
Van den Bergh, who grew up in the Ajax academy, earned two caps for Holland and played for years in the Spanish and Dutch first divisions before he moved to MLS in 2006. He started getting inquiries from some of his old European contacts about Reyna shortly after his standout performance in Italy.
It wouldn’t be long before Dortmund came calling.
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Chief scout Sven Mislintat joining Arsenal was a big blow for Dortmund in 2017. But his departure also forced the club to try new avenues.
“One of the decisions we made was to focus more on the Americas,” Markus Pilawa, Mislintat’s successor, tells The Athletic. “We didn’t know all that much about the U.S. market, and therefore decided to use existing contacts to give us better insight.”
Dan Segal, a football agent working for industry giants Wasserman, proved crucial in that respect.
Segal, who would later come to represent Reyna, provided Dortmund with an overview of the most promising talents in the States. Dortmund scouts first saw the player in a tournament in Philadelphia during the autumn of that year, but he really caught the eye at an under-16 international game in Florida a couple of months later.
“I played very well there and was contacted by many clubs as a result,” Reyna says in an exclusive interview over Zoom.
Dortmund kept tabs on his development but had to wait until he turned 17 in November 2019 before they could sign him, courtesy of a European passport he was eligible for through Claudio’s mother, who is from Portugal. By that time, all the top Premier League sides, as well as Bayern Munich and Ajax, had made advances.
Dortmund won the race because they were able to present a clear and highly detailed career plan for his advancements that wasn’t based on hypotheticals, but on an actual blueprint that had worked out well for young players such as Christian Pulisic, Ousmane Dembele and Jadon Sancho before him.
Pulisic’s career arc, in particular, proved inspirational. Seeing the Chelsea forward establishing himself as the U.S.’s most exciting player during his spell at Dortmund, Reyna says, paved the way for a host of other young Americans to follow suit.
“He didn’t just open the doors for me but for everyone (in the U.S.),” Reyna says. “Because of him, young (U.S.) players have come to Europe to big clubs, looking to take the next steps in their career. He’s the one who has really made that possible. He made us believe we could do this.”
Belief was strong in Reyna, too.
“He has the ability to play as a 9.5 or a 10, on the wings, and in the half-spaces,” says Markus Pilawa. “He can dribble, he can carry the ball, he can play with many contacts and he can be direct. We knew that Lucien Favre (the Dortmund coach) would love a player like him, and we had a very good idea of how quickly he’d be able to feature for the seniors, even if you allowed for vagaries such as his physical development and the adaptation process.
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“It wasn’t just his technical skill and physique that convinced us. We understood that he was very developed in terms of his personality; stable, eager to learn, hard working. Both parents were athletes as well… There are no guarantees in football but we thought it was highly probable that he would make it as a top professional with us.”
Dortmund’s track records with regard to fostering talent “was one of the biggest factors” for his decision to join, Reyna says. “The most important thing I talked about with my father and my agent was my need to play. Dortmund was the perfect place for me because I knew they gave young players like Christian Pulisic and Ousmane Dembele time on the pitch and a chance to do it. I knew I maybe wasn’t going to be the biggest fish in the pond at Dortmund, compared (to) going to some other Bundesliga clubs. But I was confident enough in myself to know that if I worked hard and trained hard I could make it to the first team and become a regular. I’m on the right path of doing that just now.”
Of course, there was one other major wrinkle involved with Gio’s move to Germany: The fact that his father was New York City sporting director at the time of his departure. His standout performances in the MLS club’s academy prompted then-head coach Patrick Vieira to bring him into first-team training in the latter stages of the 2017 season and for a portion of their 2018 pre-season. Scally, who signed his first pro contract with New York City that March and will move to Germany’s Borussia Monchengladbach in January, remembers Gio having a “really good camp”, fitting right in with a veteran squad led by former Barcelona and Spain striker David Villa.
If he wanted to, Gio could have signed his first professional contract with New York City. According to Claudio, he was tempted to do just that.
“He kind of went back and forth, he loves NYCFC, loves the club and the experiences that he had,” Claudio says. “He had options and had some good ones, but at the end, he just felt that one. It was as simple as that. At the end, (Dortmund) was where he ultimately felt really sure. And that’s what gave me a lot of comfort, to know that it was what he wanted to do.”
Throughout the process, Claudio and Danielle prioritised letting Gio choose what he wanted. It was important to both of them that he made his own decisions. They didn’t want any external factors, especially Claudio’s place of work, to colour their son’s judgment.
“I was his dad first,” says Claudio. “He was going to be making the decisions. I could give him my advice and help him weigh everything, but to this day there’s no pressure from home, and that was the most important. Because if he wasn’t feeling pressure from myself or his mom, then he was going to be able to make, at the end, the best decision.
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“He’s very young and it’s not easy to have all that interest and be recruited, but all of it, he led it. Working with an agent — it wasn’t me picking his agent, it was him. Same with narrowing the decisions down with Dortmund and where he wanted to go, it was all him, and I’m really proud of him for that. I didn’t ever want him to feel he had to make a decision because of any other reason than about where he, in his gut, wanted to go.”
That he left New York City for free has been a bit of a sticking point for MLS. League officials have been quite open in recent years about their desire to turn MLS into more of a seller in the global market. Losing a player as good as Gio without receiving any transfer fee doesn’t exactly fit into that plan. In fact, multiple sources around the league believe that it might have played a role in his father leaving the club to join Austin FC with a year still left on his contract. But Claudio doesn’t subscribe to that line of thinking.
“No, not at all,” he says. “I think it was handled really well. I was very up front and open about it the whole time. So I don’t think (that played any role in leaving New York City) at all, I think it was completely unrelated to that.”
Once he did arrive in Dortmund, Gio’s progress, just as Pilawa and his scouting team had anticipated, closely tracked that of Pulisic, who joined them in 2015.
“Both played for the under-19s, started training with the seniors and took six months before they could play at the highest level,” says Pilawa.
Reyna was invited to join Favre’s squad for a preseason tour of the U.S. last summer, a trip which proved a bit of a milestone for him.
“At one of the first sessions, I think it was in Seattle, the coach told me I was ready to train with them,” Gio says. “That really gave me a lot of confidence.”
He was a bit nervous at first but benefited from having previously shared the pitch with some high-profile names in New York.
“I was with players like David Villa, (Andrea) Pirlo and (Frank) Lampard, I was used to it. And now, I would play with Marco Reus, Mario Gotze, (Mats) Hummels, players with similar careers. Legends. I was a bit uptight and wanted to do everything correctly at first. The biggest thing I had to work on was my defensive positioning. Tactically, there’s so much more structure here. In New York, I was playing as a No 10 and could go wherever I wanted, but here in Germany, I learned how to cut down the (passing) angles here, see the link-up there… the coach is very precise like that.”
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Still, Favre liked what he saw. Lars Ricken, Dortmund’s academy manager, had joked that the under-19s would never get Reyna back once their first-team manager had seen the player up close. He was right. After impressive showings during the club’s winter training camp in Marbella, Spain, this January, Reyna was firmly ensconced with the seniors.
“I’ve gotten more comfortable and have really just been able to open up and show what I can do,” he says. “I knew that I really had to play my game and not care if I lost the odd ball and just kind of do what I can do.”
As everyone else soon learned, what he can do at this level is already considerable. Reyna was twice brought on for a total of 32 minutes before he scored that superb individual effort against Bremen in the German Cup, in what was his fourth career outing. Seven more part-time appearances in the league and Champions League — including that assist in the win over PSG — followed.
“With this team and this staff, it’s almost hard not to do well,” he says. “They have made it so much easier for me to take my chance and help the team score goals and make assists. I will keep learning and hopefully improving.”
Being able to tap into the experiences of players who are only a little bit older than him is also one of the benefits of the situation at Dortmund.
“The young guys like Erling (Haaland) and Jadon (Sancho) are really helpful,” Gio says. “Jadon, obviously, because he came (to Dortmund, from Manchester City) when he was my age, 16 or 17. He understands the work and the training that has to be put in by a young player to even make the squad, and then hopefully get some starts. He told me, ‘There will be some ups and downs, and even when you think you should be playing but don’t, you have to keep training and do all the things to show the coach that you’re ready.’ We also play similar positions. I can take bits and pieces from what he does and implement them in my game. And I’ll keep working, trying to emulate the same timeline that he’s on right now.”
Although we might look back at the goal against Bremen and the assist against PSG as the beginning of Gio Reyna’s rise, his father will remember a different moment.
It happened, of all places, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Notre Dame is the spiritual home of U.S. college football, a place where actual religion, one of the most successful programs in the history of the sport and a healthy dose of heartland Americana all come together. A mural painted on the Catholic institution’s main library, affectionately known as “Touchdown Jesus,” overlooks the football stadium. This is where Knute Rockne and Joe Montana earned their stripes. It’s the home of Rudy — as much a Hollywood myth-making factory as it is a conveyor belt to the NFL.
On a muggy day last July, on the seventh anniversary of his brother Jack’s death, it became the place where Gio Reyna earned his first start for Dortmund’s senior team. It wasn’t a competitive match, but it was a big moment. Dortmund and Gio, who had come off the bench in a friendly at the Seattle Sounders a few days earlier, were facing Liverpool, reigning European champions.
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In the third minute, Gio found himself with a great chance to score from just six yards out. He bungled the chance, essentially tripping over the ball before recovering, regaining possession and finding Paco Alcacer, who buried his shot for a 1-0 lead. Claudio and Danielle were there. For the proud parents, the moment was surreal; one son marking a major life milestone on the anniversary of the passing of another.
“He was starting his dream,” says Claudio. “We found out he was going to be coming with the team in pre-season and we got to see him play in Seattle and at Notre Dame against Liverpool. That was just so cool. Here he is, signing a pro deal with his club, coming back to the U.S. for preseason. My brother went to Notre Dame, we were able to visit some good friends up in Seattle, and that day at Notre Dame, that was the day that Jack had passed away. So for my wife and I and Gio, it was just this launch into his new chapter of his career. That’s one of many big moments, but that was just really cool… One of those where we went, ‘Wow, our little boy isn’t so little any more’.”
More big moments soon followed, of course. His full debut came off the bench on January 18 in a 5-3 win at Augsburg. His home debut followed on January 24 in a 5-1 win over Cologne, a match that a nervous Claudio — “my stomach was in knots, knees trembling” — attended. Then the goal against Bremen and assist against PSG.
“We can all sit here and say, like, ‘Ah, that’s normal’,” says Van den Bergh. “It really isn’t.
“I am surprised, but then I’m not, if that makes any sense. I’m surprised that, at that level, he can be that decisive. He scores goals, he has assists in the Champions League, he scores goals in the German Cup. And if you’re playing for Dortmund or Bayern Munich, you always have a target on your back. Everybody tries to beat you, so it’s not easy to play for those teams in that setting in Germany, and the way he keeps on playing his game — I’m not surprised because I know he has it in him, but I am surprised that, at this age, already he can be that impactful.”
If he continues contributing for Dortmund when the Bundesliga resumes next week, he should be in the mix for the next U.S. senior team camp, whenever it is held. A full call-up would kickstart the collective imagination of the U.S. fan base. Visions abound of Reyna and Pulisic teaming up to lead the U.S. back to the World Cup in Qatar two years from now, and then really making their mark when the tournament is played on home soil in 2026. For an American soccer public still hoping for the sport to truly break through in the U.S., the possibilities are intoxicating.
But for any of that to happen, Gio Reyna must first make it big. He’s already taken a couple of big steps. As he grows into his own man, it seems likely that many more milestones are in his future.
