When Gladbach competes against Borussia in Dortmund on Friday evening (December 19, 2025, 8:30 p.m. – live ticker at sportschau.de), Giovanni Reyna will be the focus. The ex-BVB star’s farewell to the Lower Rhine team didn’t go entirely smoothly.
It is a given in professional football that the shirt number of a departing player is reassigned. In the case of Gio Reyna, however, the story had a bad aftertaste. His number 7 was passed on to the Englishman Jobe Bellingham before the American had even left the club. He and his management were allowed to view this as a sign that they no longer wanted him on the payroll after six, sometimes great, years. Shortly before the end of the summer transfer window, the 23-year-old went to the other Borussia for around seven million euros.
“Impressed how Gladbach fought for me”
“I was really impressed by how Gladbach fought for me”said Reyna. “From the first conversation I had the feeling that the club really wanted me.” So he found what he had lost in Dortmund, the club where he was allowed to make his Bundesliga debut at the age of 17.
The son of ex-Leverkusen player Claudio Reyna was considered a mega talent and a diamond in the rough, but two things made a really great career difficult: he was and is extremely susceptible to injuries. And it is difficult to assign it to a specific position on the pitch; it is located somewhere between the ten, the eight and the half wing positions. Some coaches celebrate this as polyvalence, but in the end it actually did more harm than good.
In Gladbach, coach Eugen Polanski has so far mostly used him in the left offensive midfield. But his start was difficult. At first, the club was openly puzzled about the surprisingly poor fitness of the Filigree technician, who had completed the Club World Cup with Dortmund.
First not fit, then immediately injured again
Then he played briefly – and immediately got injured again. A small torn muscle fiber stopped Reyna after matchday 4, Polanski said at the time: “That hit Gio extremely hard, he was really exhausted. Now it’s our job to figure out how we can help him in the long term, be it through diet, sleeping habits, physio, we’re checking everything.”
Reyna came back after almost four weeks and has improved steadily since then. Polanski has a clear plan for him: “The goal is to continually give Gio more and more playing time. We all know that he is a brutally good footballer – he will give us a lot in the future.” During the game in Mainz (1-0), Reyna showed that although he is still not at 100 percent, he can also face defensive duels. That’s what Polanski demands of him, and the football sophisticate, who can easily become lethargic, seems to understand that he has reached a crucial point in his career.
competition with Florian Neuhaus
He was able to rely on his talent in his last two years in Dortmund and now in Gladbach. At VfL he has a similarly gifted competitor in Florian Neuhaus, who reported fit in time for the BVB game after a muscle injury. Polanski plays poker: “It could be that we start with Gio, but it could also be that he should help from the bench.” The returnee will definitely be highly motivated, and not just because of the issue with the jersey number 7.