FWIW (next to nothing?) he was in Maryland 2 days ago: A few photos from today's Elite/Older Advanced Summer Camps. Today's camp focused on small-sided games with an emphasis on passing and positional marking. Oh, and the kids got a treat during lunch as BSC alumni and US Men's National Team player Joe Gyau stopped by. pic.twitter.com/3U2lzCVLbf— @bethesdascnews (@bethesdascnews) June 19, 2019
Sources: FC Cincinnati kicking the tires on signing Joe Gyau. Club hold his MLS discovery rights, see him as a good fit for the 4-3-3 they're trying to implement. Parties have had preliminary discussions about a deal. Nothing imminent, but worth keeping an eye on this summer.— Sam Stejskal (@samstejskal) July 3, 2019
FCC need all the help they can get starting with a permanent manager. If Joe can help..... go get him.
Moving to Ohio: #FCCincy have acquired winger Joseph-Claude Gyau from @MSVDuisburg. Welcome to the 🔶&🔷, @36finest! 📰: https://t.co/eAUZDEt4uw pic.twitter.com/XdZ9v6La54— FC Cincinnati (@fccincinnati) August 8, 2019
Trading bratwurst for Skyline Chili...... although Cincy does have a nice bit of German heritage if Joe is feeling inclined.
I would suspect this is the last we ever hear of Joe Gyau.. brief glimmer there may be a career resurgence in the cards when he moved to Duisburg... this feels like the end though... the fade into MLS obscurity.
I'm more in the optimistic boat. I highly doubt he will become a contributing member of the USMNT but I think, if healthy, he could have a Fafa Picault impact. In other words..... good, solid decent player that can rise to the occasion when called upon.
I had high hopes for him at the youth level. To those who followed his career more closely, was it injuries that derailed him, or did he not turn out to be as good as I hoped? Sure seems like we have more than our fair share of promising players taken out by injuries, though maybe it seems that way because of the lack of depth so each one hurts more than it would in another country. I also wonder if some of our guys fall into the "good-but-not-great" category, where there is a lot of competition and they feel the pressure to come back too soon from injuries.
There were troubling signs before his injury. Yes he played one game at Dortmund but Dortmund was in a very bad place when he got on the field (I think they were hovering around the relegation zone). His loan to St. Paul had an option for a second year but the club declined it even before the season was over.
I liked the kid but I thought he relied too much on his blazing speed. Once injured, he had a hard time adjusting to what he had. His technical game didn't improve much.
Joe was at Hoffenheim with Fab Johnson and Danny Williams when he went on loan to Pauli. He was bought by Dortmund after he returned from that loan. Joe played his first match for Dortmund in September of 2014 (beginning of the season) then a month later tore his meniscus and suffered a bone bruise in October 2014 v Ecuador. Much like Gatt and Boyd who all had rehab sessions together, Joe had a succession of injuries and never really got back to 100%.
The best I can say of him is that he didn't look out of place in the 3.Liga. At least in the games I could watch courtesy of Roja Directa.
He was a promising prospect, injuries definitely derailed his career. He was out for 2 full years in his early twenties after suffering a knee injury. This was almost immediately after making his debut for Dortmund. He probably wasn't a likely to be a long term BVB player, but I'm pretty confident he could have stuck around in the Bundesliga for a while, maybe a career, maybe not. It's easy to forget how far we've come in just five years in terms of end product player development. Overall the 2010's hasn't been a time when American teenagers just walked into Bundesliga first teams e.g. Pulisic, McKennie, Adams. Not that Gyau did, but he did to make an immediate impact with BVB II when they were playing at a higher level than they have in recent years, and earned his first team appearance. I'm not buying these retrospective troubles, Gyau was definitely one of our better exports for the time. Scary to think what he could have been if he came through our current development ecosystem, as flawed as it is.
yeah I saw him in-person vs Czech Republic in Prague....right around the time he was playing for BVB 1st team...he was good. He was dangerous in that match...the USMNT won. 1 match isn't definitive...but not many American wide-mids even have 1 game at that level vs that level of opposition. I think his slaggers are just looking back retroactively and saying he wasn't that good because of how things turned out.....
I respect @bshredder and his reporting/sources, so I really want him to comment as well. Was this a mistake on your part? No one's perfect.
It wasn't a mistake. Gyau's career had very much stalled. He never broke in at Hoffenheim over the course of 5 years. He went on loan to St. Pauli. The loan wasn't very successful. He signed with BVBII, soon thereafter turned 22 and made one appearance in the Bundesliga. Things were not sunshine and lollipops for Gyau before he did his ACL in 2014.
His career hadn't stalled prior to injury. That's revisionist history. The great thing about these career threads is that we have receipts. Literally nobody was making that claim prior to his catastrophic injury complications. To say he never broke in 5 years at Hoffenheim is misleading. He was a youth player for a significant portion of that time and the other portion he was on loan at St. Pauli. St. Pauli was his first true blooding as a pro and he didn't tear it up, but he earned that move up in level and he did make an impact in games. Again, we have receipts. I feel like I need to repeat myself here but he played really really well for Dortmunds's U23's. That's why he got the opportunity to debut with the first team. His Bundesliga selection wasn't random or charity. It wasn't sunshine and lollipops for Gyau before his injury either, but it was slow and steady upward career progression both at club and international level. This was a different era. In 2019 an 18yo Gyau probably wouldn't cut it in our player pool technically. But I'm very very skeptical of anyone who claims they held the position that Gyau's stock was falling before fall of 2014.
These threads are utterly unreliable to evaluate players or remember how players used to be evaluated in the past, since everybody here is far too rah-rah crazy.
No we're not talking insight or player evaluation. I'm talking about revisionist history. There wasn't a consensus or any obvious indication that Gyau was stalling before injury. The opposite really. I'm saying the historical perception is there if we care to look, I feel it's not in alignment with the this 2019 retrospective.
I don’t think it’s fair to say his career stalled pre-injury, but I also think people overstate his progress at that point. Gyau got injured at the “perfect” point from a reputation standpoint. He had just debuted for BVB and people were pumped up. But that was the season where BVB was flirting with the relegation zone for the first half of the season and Klopp wanted to shake things up. Playing for BVB didn’t mean the same thing it often means. People were irrationally exuberant and the injury froze that sentiment in minds before the realities of the Bundesliga challenge could set in.