Mapping Borussia Dortmund: Where are the Players From?

Hey everyone! I am Patrick Morrison and I am a new writer here on Fear The Wall. If you have been around for a bit, you’ve probably seen me spew some nonsense in the comments about Mahmoud Dahoud but Sean’s finally giving me the keys to go buck wild in the writer’s room! Introductions aside, I figured we would do something a little wacky for my first article, so I present to you this:

Using the fine tools of Wikipedia, a free photoshop rip-off, and whatever I could remember from a high school semester of digital media arts, I have conjured up Fear The Wall’s Borussia Dortmund Player Map! Perhaps not the greatest title but the map does visualize where in the world BVB’s squad comes from and who they represent on the international stage. Here you can see the exact hometowns of each player, the national teams represented by Dortmund players in yellow, and the countries where Dortmund players were born but do not represent during international play in the dark grey.

Unsurprisingly, the most represented country on the map is Germany with 12 of Dortmund’s 25 players being born domestically. What is interesting about the team’s German contingent is that you can clearly see the divide between East and West Germany with only two players, Nico Shulz (Berlin) and newly signed backup keeper Alexander Meyer (Bad-Oldesloe), being born in present-day East Germany. On top of that, 4 players; Marco Reus (Dortmund), Felix Passlack (Bottrop), Mats Hummels (Berlisch Gladbach), and new third-string keeper Marcel Lotka (Duisburg) being from North-Rhine Westphalia, the state Dortmund resides in. Some of you might have also noticed that one of Dortmund’s newest signings, Karim Adeyemi, is from Munich although I am sure we can all expect him to put aside municipal pride when the first Der Klassiker rolls around on October 8^th.

Going outside of Germany, the next biggest contingent of players are from the United Kingdom with Jude Bellingham (Stourbridge), Jamie Bynoe Gittens (London), and America’s finest Giovanni Reyna (Sunderland) all being born in England. Reyna was born in England while his father was playing for Sunderland AFC but his parents, who met each other in England while playing for the U.S National Teams, moved back to New York with him when he was five years old. So I don’t care what anyone claims, he is as American as they come, baby. Another interesting note is that two Dortmund players, Raphael Guerreiro and (all-but-confirmed) newly signed forward Sébastien Haller, are both from the suburbs of Paris but neither of them plays for the French national team. Guerreiro’s father was Portuguese and has played for the Portuguese national teams since the U-21s while Haller only recently started to represent his mother’s home country of the Ivory Coast in 2020 after playing for the French youth teams. The team’s only two players to be born outside of Europe are Moukoko, who is from Cameroon’s capital of Yaoundé, and Dahoud, from the Syrian town of Amuda. Although both players were born outside of Europe, they each moved to Germany as infants and now ply their trade for the youth and senior German national teams respectively.

Now by this point hopefully you have learned a thing or two about Dortmund’s squad heading into the new season and who knows; maybe you learned geography too? Probably not but feel free to let us know what, if anything, you found interesting! Also: do you wish there were more countries represented in Dortmund’s squad? Does it even matter? Will Sean let me write another article? Again, probably not.