Reus is unique in that he joined Dortmund in his early 20s but, rather than making a big move in his prime like so many of his teammates, he chose to stay. Alexandre Simoes/Borussia Dortmund/Getty Images Marco Reus is previous. He ‘s 32, which is young-ish for the general population — he ‘s only two years older than I am — but the earth of sports has a more condense timeline. Generations of players come and go, particularly at a clubhouse like Dortmund, and the fortunes of a team can change several times in a handful of years. Reus has been at Dortmund for about 10 years. There are young Dortmund fans for whom Reus has been the face of and possibly the alone coherent playing number of the club. Though players are able to play at the highest level longer into their 30s ( Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo ) and potentially into their 40s ( Zlatan Ibrahimovic ), Reus is true closer to the ending of his career now than he is to the center of it. His graying hair is ocular proof that he ‘s no long the boy of dateless possibilities. Toward the end of our video interview in the middle of September, I facetiously asked him if we will ever see him do something playfulness with his hair’s-breadth again, like his time with frost tips or the peaky comb-over, and he said that he would have to ask his teammate Erling Haaland for ideas, but that his own hair just is n’t what it used to be when he was a young homo. But we ‘ll see. – ESPN+ viewers’ guide: LaLiga, Bundesliga, MLS, FA Cup, more
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Reading: Marco Reus, Borussia Dortmund’s elder statesman, is at peace with his place in the game

That Reus is old is a banal fact and a strange reality. People get old, things change, the years stack on top of one another ; it ‘s the most bare rule of the population. What ‘s foreign about Reus being old is that because he has stayed on a team for which new players are systematically coming in and leaving from, he is an foreigner within that machine. talented players like him are n’t supposed to make Dortmund their everlastingly homes. Robert Lewandowski came and left. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang came and left. Ilkay Gundogan, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Shinji Kagawa, Ciro Immobile, Christian Pulisic, Ousmane Dembele and Jadon Sancho have all come and gone. Donyell Malen, Youssoufa Moukoko, Jude Bellingham, Gio Reyna and, of course, Haaland, will surely leave while Reus is still there. He could have at least left field and come second, like Mario Gotze and Mats Hummels, but that besides never happened for him. The other reason Reus ‘ old age is strange is that his career has been interrupted so much by injuries that his narrative arc seems incomplete. Or quite, his narrative reads like one of possibilities deferred. Deferred and then erased. His list of injuries can cover pages, and even just a calendar month ago he suffered another knee injury while on international duty. The most reproducible thing about his career is he ‘s surely to be in the stands more often than the average player. I asked him about the natural frustrations that come with his career being hindered by all of those injuries, and whether it angers him now as it used to when he was younger. “ I have become more relax in that respect, ” he said. “ One gets to know one ‘s body better. One learns that possibly today it is good to do a bit less, to give the torso time to recover. I am 32 years old, but I even feel at the height of my powers. possibly what I missed with all those injuries in the past I am now able to bring spinal column. How one prepares for the game, for educate and to merely to know that every day is authoritative. To bring the consistency to the right balance, and then of course to be mentally prepare : that setbacks are part of biography but to not give up. ” As Reus came in and out of the picture, the years kept evanesce as he recovered and his teammates changed around him. then on the spur of the moment, in the proverbial flash of an eye, he ‘s 32. He shows up to an consultation as a man with graying haircloth. He goes from being frustrated at his body and lose time, to making the best of the time he ‘s afford. He starts thinking and talking about a life after football. As Louise Gluck wrote in her poem “ Dawn, ” “ Years and years — that ‘s how much prison term passes. All in a dream. ” I asked him if the quick passage from promising young son to elder statesman has been odd for him. “ Yes, decidedly. It is always improbable how fast the time passes. nowadays there are 17- and 18-year-olds that are at such a high level that I was at when I was their long time. It is identical crazy to see, but this is the time and now I am about one of the oldest players. It shows that one merely has to enjoy this time because you will not be able to get this time back. ”Reus, middle, is still the emotional core of a raw and exciting Dortmund side, surrounded by stars like Haaland who are destined for something bigger. Joosep Martinson/Getty Images From one position, Reus can be seen in the tragic sense as another event of what might have been — a fib american samoa honest-to-god as the game of football itself. There was once a time when his name was as hot on the remove grocery store as the talented youngsters he now mentors. He was voted the traverse star topology for FIFA 17, joining the elect group of brood stars like Messi, Neymar, Eden Hazard and Kylian Mbappe. Yet, unlike most of them, he has remained at his clubhouse, sol long that he ‘s now the second-longest-serving musician at Dortmund, after Marcel Schmelzer. – Stream LIVE: Borussia Dortmund vs. Koln, Sat. 10/30, 9:30 a.m. ET, ESPN+ Reus could have ended up at Real Madrid or Barcelona. Bayern were naturally in the conversation, as they ‘ve taken then many of Dortmund ‘s best ( Lewandowski, Hummels, Gotze ) over the years. Or he could have landed on a team in the Premier League. none of those moves materialized. He stayed at Dortmund. He chose to stay ampere much as his body forced him to stay. I asked him if he sometimes regretted never leaving. “ No, ” he said. “ I have to say that all the decisions I have made have come from the heart. I think that simply speaks to me as a person. No matter what decision I had to take, I listened to my affection. “ Of course one thinks about it if you get offers from diverse teams, top baseball club, but that is separate of it and you have to make a decisiveness at some point. But my heart has always told me that I feel the most comfortable here. To play in front of 80,000 fans is not something one wants to miss out on, and consequently the decision was never in truth unvoiced. But of class one has thought about it. ” It can be unmanageable to focus on the deliver in football. The endless cycle of seasons, along with an evenly infinite factory line of talent, players and managers, and the fantasy football element that turns pundits and fans into armchair owners and directors, means that one is always looking at what ‘s next. youthful players are a big representation of the compulsion with the future, so full of promise that it ‘s difficult not to fantasize about what they can be. The imagination runs raving mad. An entire industry of transfer rumors is built on them. Haaland is scoring goals for playfulness at Dortmund, but each finish entirely intensifies the cheer to imagine him somewhere else, to think of where he can be and what he can do in the future. In a way, those young players never sincerely exist. They ‘re barely always seen as they are at the moment. They are what they can be, what they will be. Once they hit that flower, become veterans, lose that predict, the gaze turns toward the new crop of new players who will replace them. Ramon Calderon, early president of Real Madrid, once called Guti the “ ageless promise, ” a paradoxical nickname because the midfielder, through his own personal faults and external circumstances, never became what he was envisioned to be. He never stopped being youthful in the abstract smell, evening as he neared the end of his career .Reus began his career in Dortmund’s youth ranks but left to join second-division Rot-Weiss Ahlen at 17, eventually working his way back to Dortmund’s first team in 2012. Alexander Hassenstein/Bongarts/Getty Images While talking to Reus, I started to think of him as the “ immediate portray, ” and Reus by his admission is no longer thinking about the fourth dimension he has lost or what ‘s to come. What he is concerned about is enjoying every moment of his clock time now. Trying to do his best for the team, himself, his body, and then leaving the future to come as it may. When we spoke in mid-September, I was surprised by his deciding not to go to the 2020 european Championships with Germany. But hearing him illuminate the reason behind his decision matched absolutely with how at peace he is with himself. “ It was not an slowly decision, ” he said. “ You do n’t call off such a tournament, but it was well thought out because of my injury history or the long injury I had last year. My body simply told me or gave me a sign that over a retentive period it would be better to calm things down but at same time to keep working to get my body in a better condition for the approaching season. so for this season, I tried that. I was not only at the beach and enjoying the sun, but I besides worked. I believe the blend was good. I besides did not in any way regret the decisiveness, but I accepted it and gave my body the prison term to recover. ”

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Janusz Michallik praises the operation of Jude Bellingham after Borussia Dortmund ‘s 3-1 succeed over Bielefeld. His coolness besides does n’t seem to have translated perfectly to his end. Reus has a well-earned reputation for being technical, which makes it a funny spy when he not only misses a finish, but wholly skies the ball or misses the target in general, which he did numerous times. It reached the point of him missing one finical gamble and just laying on the grass in defeat for a few seconds. He still gets fouled a distribute, besides, each foul carrying a hint of potential calamity. Players grimace and roll round to sell the filthy, but with him, I ‘m normally besides busy hoping it ‘s not dangerous to very enjoy the drollery of the moment. careless, Reus in the present is a superb player. He assisted Brandt ‘s goal in the match, and the work of the play involved all the little things that make him enjoyable to watch. Dortmund counterattacked with Marius Wolf driving the musket ball up from the leave wing, and Reus racing with him on the inside. As he was surrounded by defenders, Wolf passed the ball laterally to Reus, but a piece behind him. Reus has a detail habit of letting the testis run behind his back, rather than controlling it and turning with him. It ‘s one of those noticeable habits, along with his preference for hitting passes with the outdoor of his right infantry when he could have made the lapp pass in more practical ways. Reus let it run behind his back, met it on the other side and in the lapp apparent motion sent the ball to Brandt, now at the edge of the box. As Reus was making a footrace into the corner for a hark back pass, Brandt scored. The second most obtrusive thing about Reus when he plays now is how fiddling he holds on to the ball. Playing centrally, he frequently acted as Dortmund ‘s point of reference when they wanted to start a counterattack. normally that would be the problem of a bigger striker who can hold up the ball and then release a teammate. Reus is anything but big : he ‘s 5-foot-11 but flimsy, and was famously let go by the Dortmund youth academy for being excessively small. He even managed to accomplish the same job in his singular room, through quick interchanges. The ball would come to him, he would lay it off, move into distance, receive it again, and then play the longer ball to a teammate on the wing or in front of him. He would accomplish this then cursorily that his defender rarely had time to stabilize himself before having to look to defend that long communicate. That means of bring was n’t precisely for counterattacks. He barely carried the musket ball in general. I do n’t recall him running with the ball for more than a few yards, playing one- or two-touch the unharmed fourth dimension. He released the ball about the clamant it came to him, and would then run to receive it again. It ‘s a childlike style at the affection of a lot of footballing philosophies .Though his physical attributes are naturally declining with age, Reus still has an edge when it comes to his vision and reading of the game. Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images The failure to adapt one ‘s game to historic period and injuries can often lead to an early demise for many players. Some people play one way and fight when that manner is taken from them. Reus, in his older senesce, has made a fantastic transformation. He ca n’t beat fast defenders in a foot race anymore, but he can do evening more wrong by thinking quicker than them, taking advantage of pockets of quad, buzzing around like the bee that he and his teammates are dressed as. Reus ‘ play style now is a great metaphor for Reus the person and athlete. There ‘s little anxiety to him, no need for him to prove anything. He gets the ball and lets it go, all the while trusting the dramatic, younger players around him. He does what he can to put them in positions to succeed, his natural fuel accompanied by a greater intelligence and use of the here and now. In other words, he ‘s having so much fun act and enjoying being himself, grey hairs and all. Before the Champions League match against Ajax in late October, Dortmund coach Marco Rose, praised Reus as the central figure. “ He is our captain and he plays and acts like that. I can rely on him 100 percentage. He is an outstanding football player, he is at the service of the team and he is in a dependable supreme headquarters allied powers europe. That ‘s the most crucial thing for me. He ‘s in actually good shape. If he ‘s missing, we ‘re missing a lot. Marco is an significant glue that holds the team in concert. ”