Comparing Marco Reus' 2014/15 Stats to His 2013/14 Numbers

In Saturday's DFB Pokal Cup final, we saw an impressive Wolfsburg side slowly but surely take apart a Borussia Dortmund team that had had just about enough of a dreadful season. 

Yet among the bruised and battered Dortmund players stood a star whose light shone just a little dimmer than usual. Marco Reus wasn't up to too much throughout the game and was ultimately brought off before full-time. 

Unfortunately such a performance was only too representative of the frustrating season this forward has endured: bright in parts but certainly not at his best by any stretch of the imagination. 

When we take a look at Reus' stats for this season, via Transfermarkt, we find the left-sided forward has managed to tally up 11 goals and six assists in 29 games over the course of the season.

At first such a tally doesn't seem all that bad. After all, Eden Hazard only managed seven more goals for Chelsea this season and seven more assists. And he ended up being Chelsea's player of the season. Of course, it's much more complicated than that. 

For a start, Reus is expected to score and assist much more than that within German football for a club like Dortmund. Last season, for example, we saw the German international pull together an impressive 23 goals and 23 assists over the course of 44 games. It was a truly incredible return from a player who was certainly considered among the best in the world at the time.

Massimo Pinca/Associated Press

That was, of course, a Reus who was on the top of his game and perhaps more importantly keeping fit and playing regularly for the side. As we can see from the aforementioned stats, the 26-year-old managed to notch up 15 more games last season compared to this current campaign—a significant chunk that could definitely make or break a season. 

However, that doesn't completely explain the drop in goals and assists. 

When we look a little closer at the stats, we can see that Reus played a grand total of 2,243 minutes in all competitions this season for Dortmund. This, in turn, comes out at either a goal or an assist every 132 minutes over the course of the campaign.

Compare that to the corresponding figures from the year before and we get a figure somewhere near a goal or an assist every 76 minutes. That essentially means Reus has taken almost twice as long to go from one goal to the next this season compared to the last. 

This suggests that the Dortmund forward has, in fact, regressed as an attacking threat over the course of the past 12 months. Sure, he may not have played as many games through injury this season, but when he was on the pitch, he was only half as effective at either finding the net himself or indeed setting up one of his team-mates. 

There are, of course, factors that we must consider here. The first is that despite only missing 15 more games, Reus was clearly not fully fit for large parts of the season in which he did play. Similarly, the team around him—missing Robert Lewandowski up front in particular—was far from the one that finished second in the Bundesliga the year before. 

Yet unfortunately this all comes back to form a single, solid conclusion to the season in which Reus has just had. Whether through his own fault or a variety of outside factors, Reus' stats simply haven't been as good this season as they were the year before.