Borussia Dortmund is a club in a weird state of purgatory.
On one hand, Dortmund is a huge club with a gigantic stadium and a passionate fan base, big enough to win trophies and attract some of Europe’s brightest talents.
But over the past decade, Dortmund has struggled to convince its top young players that their fortunes would be best served by staying. When Europe’s giants come calling, Dortmund’s brightest stars almost always leave.
The list is long: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, İlkay Gündoğan, Jadon Sancho, Ousmane Dembélé, Christian Pulisic and Erling Haaland are just a few of the high-profile players Dortmund has lost in recent seasons.
And so Dortmund has become something of an almost club: winning the occasional trophy while continuously falling just short in the Champions League and the Bundesliga, where Bayern Munich has now won 10 straight titles.
One top young player who did not leave, despite chances to do so, was Marco Reus, who has been one of the club’s top players since joining in 2012.
Now 33, Reus admitted he couldn’t help but lament some of his club’s major departures since he first arrived at Signal Iduna Park.
“It’s always a shame to see that we sign incredibly good young players who then unfortunately have the dream of developing somewhere else after two or three years,” the Dortmund captain told the OMR podcast.
“If we had been able to keep the players we had, we would have made quite a splash in Europe.”
Indeed.
The focus will now turn toward the future of Jude Bellingham, who has already become one of the top midfielders in Europe at age 19. Amid talk of a nine-figure transfer fee, the England international has been tipped to leave Dortmund in the next year or two.
Bellingham could buck the trend but it seems much more likely that he’ll join a long list of top talent who decided their future lies away from Dortmund.
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