Gio Reyna's Struggles: Time to Give Up on the USMNT's Next Star?

Is it time to give up on Gio Reyna becoming the USMNT's next star?

USMNT fans have had high hopes for Reyna, but after years of him struggling at Borussia Dortmund, is it time to give up on a breakthrough?

For the lack of game-play data, we do have a ton of injury data. Per the site Transfermarkt, Reyna has missed 498 days due to injury since his career began, for 17 different reasons: colds, illnesses, infections, strains and fissures of the fibula. There's a fantastic book coming out soon from former ESPN editor Henry Abbott, "Ballistic," about the new science of injury prevention. If anyone from Reyna's team is reading this, I would highly recommend reading that book, too.

Beyond that, I can provide no insight on how to fix Gio Reyna's body because I am not a doctor. However, some newly available data can shine a light on how all the injuries may have affected the way Reyna plays for his club and the US. men's national team. He's not only missing lots of games, but he's moving very differently on the field.

In every NBA arena, there are multiple cameras installed up inside the catwalk up above the nosebleed seats. Twenty-five times per second, the cameras take a picture of what's happening on the court. The pictures then get merged together and converted into data (X, Y, and Z coordinates for every player and the ball), and when you string them all together, you're left with a digitized version of the game.

Although it's incredibly complex, this data paints a much more realistic picture of what actually happens on the court than a traditional box score. At NBA.com, you can look up who the fastest player in the league is, who takes the most touches per shot, who boxes out an opposition player on the highest percentage of rebound opportunities, and all kinds of other fine-grained statistics.

Soccer isn't there yet -- for a lot of different reasons, but one of them is the open league structure. NBA teams all agree to share tracking data with each other. There are no issues because no one is getting relegated and the majority of the players whom NBA teams are scouting are other NBA players. Everyone benefits, each year.

However, since three teams are promoted or relegated each year, and clubs are mostly scouting outside of their own league, a number of structural factors have prevented any kind of uniform adoption of tracking data across European soccer. Top leagues like the Premier League now do have tracking-data providers, but the actual use of the data is middling at best.

To get around this issue, a number of third-party providers have come up with a way to derive the same X, Y, and Z data from television broadcasts. The problem with TV streams is that they rarely show all 22 players. They rarely even show half of them.

But since so much data is being collected from even a single match, these companies are able to predict where everyone else on the field likely is based on a massive backlog of historical data, and based on where those players were last spotted on the screen. The approach is way cheaper and way easier to accomplish at scale.

PFF FC have partnered with one of these companies, Sportlogiq, to track the physical outputs of players across 40 different leagues. And based on what their model has derived from watching the 1,869 minutes Gio Reyna has played for Borussia Dortmund over the past four seasons, one thing is clear.

It's not only that he's not playing much anymore. He's not sprinting much anymore, either.

If you're an average attacking midfielder who has played at least 270 minutes in the Bundesliga this season, here's what you'll do across an average 90-minute match:

• You'll reach a maximum speed of about 30.8 kilometers per hour • You'll accelerate at a rate of 3 meters per second squared 43.1 times • You'll decelerate at the same rate 48.5 times • You'll run at a high speed between 20 km/h and 25 km/h 83.6 times • And you'll sprint at a speed of 25/km/h or more 18.5 times

But if you're Gio Reyna, here's what you've done:

• Max speed: 27.7 km/h • Accelerations per 90: 44.1 • Decelerations per 90: 49.4 • High-speed runs per 90: 74.5 • Sprints per 90: 11.0

For the high-end comparison: Bayer Leverkusen's superstar 21-year-old Florian Wirtz reached a max speed of 32.6 km/h this season, and he's sprinting 25.6 times per 90 minutes.

Reyna, though, has never been a super-athlete. In fact, what differentiated him from almost every other American player ever is that he didn't need to be a super-athlete. His game was all nuance and vision, all stops and starts -- it's not surprising, then, that the areas where he still grades out reasonably well are in the sudden changes of pace, both fast and slow.

However, his max speed (calculated as the average of the fastest speeds you reached in five different games) ranks last among all qualified Bundesliga attacking midfielders. In fact, it's last among all Bundesliga attackers and eighth-to-last among all outfield players.

It's a similar story for the volume of sprints, too. No other attacking midfielder has sprinted fewer than 14 times per 90 minutes, and the only players who have sprinted less often than Reyna in the Bundesliga this season are six central midfielders.

Now, physical output isn't purely confined to a player's physical abilities. In the Premier League, Reyna's former loan club, Nottingham Forest, cover less ground than almost any other team in England, but that's less because their players can't run and more because of the more defensive tactical approach employed by their manager, Nuno Espirito Santo. If they hired, say, Ange Postecoglu, they'd shoot toward the top of the league all of a sudden.

However, when compared to his Dortmund teammates this season, Reyna still comes out with the slowest max speed and the fewest sprints. He's even below 33-year-old midfielder Pascal Gross, who had really begun to struggle with the physical demands of the Premier League for Brighton last season.

These numbers, too, are low even for Reyna. His max speed had declined in each of the three previous seasons: 30.8 in 2021-22, 30.1 in 2022-23, and 28.3 last season. The sprints don't follow the same pattern, but they've also bottomed out this year: 15.6 in 2021-22, 16.2 in 2022-23, and 18.1 last season. The number of accelerations and decelerations are also the lowest they've been in any of the past four seasons.

The drop-off in top-end speed coincided with a broken leg during a Nations League match against Canada in the summer of 2023. That kept him out of action for 90 days, and then a groin injury suffered at USMNT training last September cost him another 77 days -- and 19 combined matches with Dortmund and the USMNT.

Now, none of this data is perfect, and we're only working off of 300-plus league minutes this season. But the physical metrics are so bad for such a young player that it's really hard to look at any of this and say, "It's nothing." Overlay the injury history on top of the declining high-intensity outputs, and it's also really hard not to see a malfunctioning body sabotaging a player's ability to move at the speeds necessary to compete at the highest level.

USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino seemed to suggest as much, when he said that Reyna wasn't "ready to play in the way that we expect from him" after the 1-0 loss to Panama in the Nations League final.

The positive way to look at this: He's not healthy, he's still only 22, so he just needs to get healthy. The negative way to look at this: Limited athletes like Reyna can't afford to lose any athleticism given that they're just barely athletic enough to start with. Whatever viewpoint is right, it's pretty clear that Reyna will not be able to compete in one of the best leagues in the world when he's moving like this. Something has to change: he needs to take time off, he needs a new approach toward movement, he needs to find a better way to take care of his body, and/or he has to go to a new club and league.

Until then, his career and his body will just keep plodding along.