Marco Reus is old. He's 32, which is young-ish for the general population -- he's only two years older than I am -- but the world of sports has a more condensed timeline. Generations of players come and go, especially at a club like Dortmund, and the fortunes of a team can change several times in a handful of years.
Reus has been at Dortmund for almost 10 years. There are young Dortmund fans for whom Reus has been the face of and possibly the only consistent playing figure 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 admittedly closer to the ending of his career now than he is to the middle of it. His graying hair is visual proof that he's no longer the boy of endless possibilities.
Toward the end of our video interview in the middle of September, I jokingly asked him if we will ever see him do something fun with his hair again, like his time with frosted tips or the spiky comb-over, and he said that he would have to ask his teammate Erling Haaland for ideas, but that his own hair just isn't what it used to be when he was a young man. But we'll see.
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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 simple rule of the universe. What's strange about Reus being old is that because he has stayed on a team for which young players are consistently coming in and leaving from, he is an outsider within that machine. Talented players like him aren't supposed to make Dortmund their forever homes.
