Is Reyna Playing Better Than Pulisic At His Age?
Another firestorm take that didn't really make sense to me, examined.
I tweeted this over the weekend. It sparked some strong reactions.
Some people agreed. Some people disagreed. Some people said I was engaging in “fuckery.” Those people got blocked.
I made the statement without the intention of saying which player was actually better, which player would be better, or whether one player was worse than the other. Christian Pulisic is the most important attacking talent on one of the best teams in the world, a club that has had to re-start somewhat under Frank Lampard, but will be looking to secure trophies before long, or else boot their coach. Gio Reyna is still just 17 years old, and he’s playing for Dortmund, who are also one of the best teams in the world, but they play in a league that has Bayern Munich in it, and rarely do you see the same trophy expectations placed upon their managers as you do with Chelsea’s. That’s just my perspective as a Dortmund fan. At the end of the day, you can accurately describe Pulisic as an international star without bias. You cannot say the same about Reyna as of yet.
The point of the statement, from the jump, was just expressing excitement about Reyna and the possibilities his current career trajectory suggest. Because I truly do think that Reyna is playing better at this point in his career, at this age, with this club, than Pulisic did. Different players, slightly different positions, and a different team around them, yes. But, with still a month to go before Reyna is able to drive in Germany, I think he’s a more vital part of his club than Pulisic was around the same time. And, since those time periods coincide at the same club, we have a unique chance to actually compare the two.
Since Pulisic has a September birthday, I gave him the benefit of counting stats up to his actual 18th birthday, which was September 18th, 2016. It didn’t seem fair to actually go a month back from that point when that ends the stat-tracking period in mid-August, when no games are being played. From the time he made his Dortmund debut at 17 to his 18th birthday, Christian Pulisic recorded 3 goals and 3 assists in just over 600 minutes of play across the Bundesliga, the DFB-Pokal, the Champions League, and the Europa League, according to Transfermarkt. Across the same competitions (minus the Europa League, since Dortmund haven’t competed in it while Reyna has been a member of the first team), Gio has also recorded 3 goals, while doubling Pulisic’s assist count at 6, and played about 100 minutes more than Pulisic did.
Let’s also consider the team make-up that the two players walked into. Pulisic, despite spending most of his time with the US youth national teams playing as a No. 10, was almost immediately used as a winger by Thomas Tuchel in Dortmund’s team, and the position stuck. You found him most often playing alongside people like Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang as the team’s first-choice striker. Gio also came through the youth teams playing a healthy amount of No. 10, and while he has also played the wing, he’s retained more of that central midfielder position in Lucien Favre’s current favored 3-4-3 formation that features Erling Haaland as the striker and two playmakers sitting a bit more centrally under him, while the outside mids/fullbacks in the line of four patrol the wings.
And, finally, let’s look at the games that generated the stats for the players. Pulisic’s goals came against Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Darmstadt in this period, while his assists came against Darmstadt and Legia Warsaw. Gio’s goals came against Werder, Monchengladbach, and Duisburg, while assists have come against Leipzig, Freiburg, Monchengladbach, and Paris Saint-Germain.
Are goals and assists a good indicator of how well a player is playing? Yes and no. As literally all of the analytics crowd reading this will no doubt be screaming at their screens as they see me just talk about goals and assists: goals and assists are noisy. At least, they can be. They don’t necessarily correlate with consistency or even good or bad performances. They are, however, what the game still primarily traffics in. You don’t see a player win Player of the Year in a league for having a season-long xG of 37.3 goals when they only converted 16 of those. And I also don’t have the time, money, or know-how to dive into the advanced analytics of both players in such a strangely-defined time period. So, I’m a little stuck with the raw, noisy numbers. But I do think they tell an interesting story here.
Pulisic and Reyna scored the same amount of goals, while Reyna grabbed more assists, and, importantly, typically did it against bigger teams and in bigger moments than Pulisic did in this time period. Two of the four teams Pulisic scored his goals and notched assists against were relegated the season in which he did it, and another one was a Polish team in the Champions League that allowed 24 goals in the group stage. The most of any team in that year’s competition. By an eight goal margin. The other team was Hamburg, who finished tenth. Reyna has a goal against Duisburg, in the third division, but also has one against a Champions League team in ‘Gladbach, in addition to his three assists against them, an assist against Leipzig, an assist against PSG in the Champions League, a trio of assists against Bundesliga mainstays Freiburg, and oh yeah, he did this in a Cup elimination game in his, like, third or fourth pro appearance?
Were all of Gio’s stats of this quality? No! In fact, several of his assists felt like very average passes, either plays with huge windows that are hard to miss, or assists that can be explained by the anomaly that is Erling Haaland, who is quickly on his way to becoming the best striker in the world. I know Pulisic had Aubameyang in front of him. Haaland is going to be better than Aubameyang. And he might be better than him already, if I’m being honest. The kid is nuts.
So, what do we say here, with the raw, noisy numbers, an annoyingly low sample size, and two different positions in two very different teams? Simple, I think: Gio is still a more important member of his Dortmund squad than Pulisic was to his Dortmund squad at this point in time. You see that in how many minutes he’s already played and how many options are realistically in front of Gio on Dortmund’s depth chart. You see that in how Dortmund already turn to Gio in the massive moments, where Pulisic’s development was a bit more cautious, not quite thrown to the wolves in the same way Gio has been. And yes, I consider playing against PSG in the Champions League to be a more massive moment than playing Spurs in Europa, which is probably the closest Pulisic can come to the argument, this time period all happening before his appearances against Real Madrid in 2016.
Ultimately, the argument between the two is very, very close. But really, I’m not here to argue between the two. Saying Gio is playing better, or is a more important member of Dortmund’s squad at his age than Pulisic was at the same age, is not really arguing that one player is better than the other, or even that one player will become better than the other. Pulisic took a massive step up at Chelsea, and there’s no guarantee Reyna will do the same some day. He’s still very raw, and he still is inconsistent. My standard line on player development is that it’s equal parts science and tea leaf reading; there’s no way to tell how a player will turn out. Unless it’s Erling Haaland. I think everyone is correct about how he’ll turn out.
What I’ve been trying to say all this time is that Gio’s ceiling is possibly higher at this stage of his career than almost any USMNT prospect that’s come before him. That’s not a knock on Christian Pulisic or Landon Donovan or anyone else. That’s just the facts in this case. And that’s good. When I say Gio is playing better than Pulisic at this age, I’m not trying to start a debate amongst you all. I’m trying to give you invitation to hope, to dream a little bit. To imagine a world where the USMNT actually does have its prospects turn out in a big way. Gio isn’t the finished article, and I don’t know if he becomes as good or important as Christian Pulisic is at this second. But there is a very realistic chance that he will, and there’s even a realistic chance that he exceeds what Pulisic has already done. And if we live in a world where both Pulisic and Gio have reached their ceilings, we live in a world where the USMNT can challenge any other team out there.
The goals and assists are noisy, sure. And someone can probably come along and tell me I’ve applied the stats in an incorrect way. That’s fine. I’m not overly concerned with being absolutely correct with every number out there. It ultimately won’t change my point at all: Gio is damn good. He might even be as good as we hope he is. This is not the cold water newsletter article. It’s a golden ticket, it’s a red pill, it’s a trip down the rabbit hole.
Dream a little, folks. It might just happen.
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May I Have This Kind of Commitment to Absolutely Anything
Have an excellent Monday, everyone.