Marco Reus has found it easier to breathe since moving to Los Angeles.Not literally: as anyone who has experienced LA traffic will tell you, the lungs can take a hammering. But in a broader sense: the word he uses is “freedom”, a freedom to enjoy life away from the sometimes unbearable pressure of being a club legend.That’s how things were during his 12 seasons for Borussia Dortmund, often carrying the hopes of a team that were constantly chasing Bayern Munich, usually without much luck, glory just out of reach. That wasn’t so much an issue on the pitch, but more away from it: when you’re the most prominent player at a club as big as Dortmund, in a city as (relatively) small as Dortmund… well, going out for a quiet dinner with the family is tricky.“Just for me and my family, it feels more like freedom,” he tells The Athletic. “It gives us more potential to do things outside of football, and to enjoy the time away from home. In Dortmund it was quite hard to do it. But here, of course, it’s nice.”Reus moved to LA Galaxy in August 2024 after more than 500 appearances in Germany and three Bundesliga Player of the Year wins.Fortunes have fluctuated, stateside. A few months after arriving in California, he was in the Galaxy team that won their sixth MLS Cup, their first in a decade, beating the New York Red Bulls 2-1 in the final.Things have been trickier since. They finished a distant 14th in the Western Conference last season, going winless in their first 10 games. Reus missed big chunks of the campaign with knee and hamstring injuries. This term has been better but only marginally: at the time of writing they are 11th, having not managed back-to-back wins all season.“The first months were incredible, winning the MLS Cup,” Reus says. “And the second year was… yeah, we were struggling a lot, the whole team. We couldn’t figure it out last year.”The team might not be where they want to be right now, but Reus is still Reus. And he still does things that remind you of the 20-year-old who burst on to the scene with first Borussia Monchengladbach, then, after returning to Dortmund, where he had been as a youth player.One such moment was an astonishing pass to set up a goal for Gabriel Pec against the Seattle Sounders, just before the World Cup break.Reus, playing as a false nine, dropped deep to collect the ball while Pec made a run in from the left to exploit the space created by Reus’s movement.Even though the run was good, Reus had a narrow corridor, maybe three or four yards wide, through which to thread the ball, which he had to do with enough weight to pierce the defence but not so much that it would just harmlessly run through to the goalkeeper.The corridor actually narrowed as two defenders closed in to try to cut it out…… but Reus still managed to find the space, and Pec went on to finish neatly.“You have a certain time window of, ‘Should I do it now, or just play a simple pass?’ I knew Gabi loves to run deep, but this was about do it now or just play the ball to the side and we have a different type of situation.