Gio Reyna met Erling Haaland in January 2020 in Marbella, Spain. Reyna had just graduated to the Dortmund first team, and Haaland was the new signing from Salzburg. This was winter camp, and they would have both been nervous and expressed it in different ways.
We don’t know all they talked about at winter camp, but their first interaction probably would have been, at least in structure, a lot like a normal conversation -- exchanging basic background information in effort to find some common ground. Haaland is from a small town in southwest Norway called Bryne, so we can expect the initial exchange, in part, to have gone like this:
Or at least that’s the best video I can find approximating a Haaland introduction. In any case, Bryne and New York City are very different places, so they’d have moved on to something else. Possibly toward that their dads had both been professional soccer players. Haaland would have then asked Reyna if Claudio passed the ball, and next he’d have interrupted in a near shouting voice before Reyna could finish saying 'yes?' that that's exactly want he wanted son Reyna to do to him. Pass the ball to Erling.
The five major types of Reyna-to-Haaland passes
I’ve completed a review of every pass Reyna has ever made to Haaland (for which there is publicly available footage) and determined it makes the most sense to organize them into five major pass types. Reasonable people can disagree on any number of things about how I've gone about organizing these passes, but my decision here, for the purposes of this article, is final.
Pass Type #1: Did not pass the ball to Erling
This category is straight-forward enough, other than it being made of passes that were not to Haaland. It’s important to include them, though, as 1) it seems like they
could have been played to Haaland and 2) Haaland is visibly annoyed they were not (or, in cases where he's not visible annoyed, we can otherwise reasonably assume he actually is annoyed, even though he didn't show it, given the game context).
Pass Type #2: When Erling's back is to goal
These passes do not happen terribly often because Haaland far prefers always to be sprinting headlong toward goal, but they do happen (only out of necessity) frequently enough to demand their own group.
Pass Type #3: Through-ball into a wide area
The less said about this type of pass the better. There were four or five of these but they're unpleasant to watch, so I’ve cut it down to one example that I think gives the idea well enough.
Pass Type #4: Cross
Reyna crosses to Haaland will generally come from inside, or just outside, the box and will tend to be played from closer to the end line than not.
Pass Type #5: Little Passes of Danger
These are the most common and most valuable of Reyna-to-Haaland passes. They are, as the name suggests, little passes that put Haaland in an immediately dangerous position to score a goal. They are likely the only passes that Haaland actually cares about. He prefers them most in transition and to his left foot, but he’s willing to except them in any situation so long as they allow him to smash the ball at the goal as quickly as possible.
Addendum
There have been, unfortunately, two Reyna-to-Haaland passes that I do not believe fit cleanly enough into any of the above five categories. We'll have to wait and see if more passes like these emerge over the coming months and years, at which point we could consider adding another Reyna-to-Haaland pass type.
Horizontal type pass in transition
Central Through-Ball of Moderate Length