Боруссия Дортмундын домогт тоглогч Марко Ройс АНУ-ын Лос-Анжелес Галаксид нэгдсэнээр хөлбөмбөгөөс гадуурх амьдралдаа илүү эрх чөлөөг мэдэрч буйгаа онцоллоо.
2024 оны наймдугаар сард Лос-Анжелес Галаксид шилжин ирсэн Марко Ройс тус багийн бүрэлдэхүүнд багтаж, Нью-Йорк Ред Буллс багийг хожиж, сүүлийн арван жилд анх удаа MLS Cup-ын эзэн болсон билээ. Гэсэн хэдий ч багийн хувьд өнгөрсөн улиралд Баруун бүсийн 14-р байрт бичигдсэн бол энэ улиралд 11-р байранд тогтвортой бус тоглолт үзүүлсээр байна. Бэртэл гэмтлийн улмаас тоглолтуудыг өнжсөн Ройс багийн хямралыг даван туулахад хүндрэлтэй байгааг хүлээн зөвшөөрөв.
Талбай дээрх тоглолтын хувьд тэрээр Сиэтл Саундерс багийн эсрэг Габриэль Пекийн гоолыг дамжуулсан гайхалтай пасс болон Сент-Луис Ситигийн эсрэг үзүүлсэн техникийн өндөр ур чадвараараа хуучин хэвээрээ гэдгээ харуулсаар байна. Тоглогч өөрийн амжилтын нууцыг талбайг бүхэлд нь уншиж, хамгаалагчдын хариу үйлдлийг урьдчилан таамаглах зөн совинтой холбон тайлбарлав. Түүнчлэн Реал Солт Лэйкийн эсрэг тоглолтод үзүүлсэн чөлөөт цохилтын хуурамч үйлдэл нь түүний сэтгэл зүйн бэлтгэл болон тогтвортой байдлын илрэл байлаа.
Өөрийн карьерын туршлага болон Пьер-Эмерик Обамеянгтай хамт тоглож байсан үеэ дурсахдаа Ройс талбай дээрх харилцан ойлголцол нь амжилтын гол түлхүүр гэдгийг онцолсон юм. Тэрээр хэдийгээр багийн амжилт тааруу байгаа ч өөрийн тоглолтын арга барилаа өөрчлөхгүй бөгөөд шинэ санаа, эрсдэлтэй шийдвэрүүдийг гаргасаар байх болно гэдгээ мэдэгдлээ.
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Marco Reus has found it easier to breathe since moving to Los Angeles.
Not literally: as anyone who has experienced LA traffic will tell you, the lungs can take a hammering. But in a broader sense: the word he uses is “freedom”, a freedom to enjoy life away from the sometimes unbearable pressure of being a club legend.
That’s how things were during his 12 seasons for Borussia Dortmund, often carrying the hopes of a team that were constantly chasing Bayern Munich, usually without much luck, glory just out of reach. That wasn’t so much an issue on the pitch, but more away from it: when you’re the most prominent player at a club as big as Dortmund, in a city as (relatively) small as Dortmund… well, going out for a quiet dinner with the family is tricky.
“Just for me and my family, it feels more like freedom,” he tells The Athletic. “It gives us more potential to do things outside of football, and to enjoy the time away from home. In Dortmund it was quite hard to do it. But here, of course, it’s nice.”
Reus moved to LA Galaxy in August 2024 after more than 500 appearances in Germany and three Bundesliga Player of the Year wins.
Fortunes have fluctuated, stateside. A few months after arriving in California, he was in the Galaxy team that won their sixth MLS Cup, their first in a decade, beating the New York Red Bulls 2-1 in the final.
Things have been trickier since. They finished a distant 14th in the Western Conference last season, going winless in their first 10 games. Reus missed big chunks of the campaign with knee and hamstring injuries. This term has been better but only marginally: at the time of writing they are 11th, having not managed back-to-back wins all season.
“The first months were incredible, winning the MLS Cup,” Reus says. “And the second year was… yeah, we were struggling a lot, the whole team. We couldn’t figure it out last year.”
The team might not be where they want to be right now, but Reus is still Reus. And he still does things that remind you of the 20-year-old who burst on to the scene with first Borussia Monchengladbach, then, after returning to Dortmund, where he had been as a youth player.
One such moment was an astonishing pass to set up a goal for Gabriel Pec against the Seattle Sounders, just before the World Cup break.
Reus, playing as a false nine, dropped deep to collect the ball while Pec made a run in from the left to exploit the space created by Reus’s movement.
Even though the run was good, Reus had a narrow corridor, maybe three or four yards wide, through which to thread the ball, which he had to do with enough weight to pierce the defence but not so much that it would just harmlessly run through to the goalkeeper.
The corridor actually narrowed as two defenders closed in to try to cut it out…
… but Reus still managed to find the space, and Pec went on to finish neatly.
“You have a certain time window of, ‘Should I do it now, or just play a simple pass?’ I knew Gabi loves to run deep, but this was about do it now or just play the ball to the side and we have a different type of situation.
“It was just instinct. Sometimes it’s about recognising situations before they happen. How the centre-backs react when I come deep, or the left-backs or the right-backs, and then knowing my team-mates and what they really love to do. Then it just comes down to a 0.1 second chance to do it.”
Another flash of brilliance came against St Louis City last season, another sensational assist, this one coming from flicking the ball through a defender with a sort of dynamic, Cruyff turn/backheel hybrid move, through to Matheus Nascimento.
Just before the ball reaches him, Reus’ head spins around twice, so quickly that it’s easy to miss with the naked eye, and it makes you realise that what really sets the elite apart from the rest is not necessarily the physical ability to do certain things with the ball; it’s the ability to spot those things are possible before anyone else.
“You have to understand, to know where the opponent will be in different situations. That means you have to scan your opponent in quite different situations when the ball is on the right, when the ball is on the left, when the ball is in the middle, to see how they are reacting.
“I think (that scanning) was always in my head. I never had to train it. It’s quite hard to explain it, but the good thing in my career was I never had to use my brain so much to do it. It’s pretty much 80, 90 per cent instinct.
“Then it’s also about just doing it, and believing that if you don’t try it, you never will succeed in this type of situation. If it works out, incredible, nice. If not, at least I tried.”
Free kicks fall into that category. Reus is still happy to take the risk that comes with such a relatively low-percentage scenario, and what’s interesting is that he seems to approach them in a similar way that many approach penalties. There’s the psychological battle with the goalkeeper, for a start, as he showed against Real Salt Lake earlier this season.
That free kick was on the edge of the box, towards the left of the area as Reus looked. The psych-out started by placing Galaxy players on the right side of the defensive wall, suggesting they would clear a path for Reus to aim for that side. With the free kick being relatively close in, Real Salt Lake goalkeeper Rafael Cabral had a choice to make: does he stay still and gamble that he could reach the shot wherever Reus put it, or does he move left or right?
Reus approaches the ball with a fairly open body, doubling down on the dupe and suggesting he would go for that corner, which Cabral seems to buy, taking a step to his left, right as Reus looked.
But then just as he struck the ball, Reus whipped his foot around and put it into the other top corner, to his left and the keeper’s right. It was a shot struck so well that Cabral might not have got there even if he had read Reus’s intentions correctly, but with the fake-out causing him to shift his weight the other way, he didn’t stand a chance.
Reus talks about lining up these free kicks like someone else might talk about penalties.
“For me, breathing is the key. Just focus on the spot. Then it’s about repeating what you always do in training. It’s more about getting back to your routine.
“You have so much time, and it’s just about focusing in this moment. Everybody wants to come to you and talk to you, and blah blah blah. The breathing is very important to calm you down. Then hopefully the wall doesn’t jump too high, you see what the goalkeeper is doing, then go for it.”
He talks about his more recent moments of brilliance almost clinically, like this sort of thing is pretty standard. But his eyes light up a little when he’s shown a goal he scored for Gladbach, when he was 20.
“Oh yes, I like this,” he smiles, watching young Marco drive through a retreating defence before smacking a shot in off the bar.
How does he feel looking back on the younger version of himself? What are the main ways he is different to that kid?
“When you are young, you just don’t think about too many things,” he says. “You just do it. And if you’re getting older, you have experience. You are going through different moments, good vibes, bad vibes, injuries and stuff like that. Back then, I knew I had the potential to be a very good player. For me, it was just trying to fulfil that.”
Part of that fulfilment has been to take risks. “You have to understand that if you’re not creating and if you’re not trying, you will fail anyway,” he says. “So the option is just to do something and try to do different things on the pitch.
“But of course you need players around you to understand how you like to play. Luckily I have in my career enough players who understand me and my vision, and that helps me to be like me on the pitch.”
One of the players Reus cites as being particularly on his wavelength is Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, with whom he played for five years at Dortmund.
“He’s a guy who’s not selfish, even though he’s a striker. So that made our relationship much easier: he could give me the ball, I could give him the ball. I knew what he liked to do, he knew what I liked to do.
“He’s just a funny guy, he loves to be around good people and he’s not a typical striker, not a typical No 9. He’s more like a guy who likes to go on the left, on the right, to be in different areas on the pitch and that was good for me.
“So many strikers or wingers just maybe want to get the ball in their feet, and he’s more a guy who loves to run deep, so it was the perfect match for both of us.”
The Athletic spoke to Reus just before the break for the World Cup. He said then that he hoped a mental break would help, that it would boost the Galaxy’s chances of improving in the second half of the season. That hasn’t gone entirely to plan so far. At the time of writing, they have drawn one and lost one.
But Reus will still be Reus. He’ll still be doing the things he’s done for his whole career.
“I like to have ideas in my head and to try something out; sometimes it goes right, sometimes not. That is what I love, and until my last day I will always go for that.”
