Dortmund and the Marcel Regula Gamble: Buying a No.10 to Patch the Right-Back Hole

A left-footed left-back pushed over to the right flank, and in one counter-attacking move he has to rotate 180 degrees to carry the ball toward the opponent's goal. That turn is half a beat slower than a true right-back's. Half a beat is enough for an opposing winger to catch up and break the attack. Nobody in the stands names the problem. But the problem has a name: since Yan Couto moved to Como, Dortmund have had no specialist right-back beyond Julian Ryerson. Daniel Svensson — a left-back — has had to fill the gap, and the club itself is said to be unhappy with that makeshift solution. Geometry is not on the drawing board; it lives between the runs. At Dortmund right now, a left-back's run is drawing a wrong geometry on the right. And the way this club has chosen to fix it, according to what is leaking out, is stranger still than the original error. According to reporting from Sky and Bild, Dortmund are targeting Marcel Regula — a 19-year-old attacking midfielder at Zagłębie Lubin in Poland's Ekstraklasa — with a fee discussed around 7 million euros. The notable part: Regula plays almost exclusively as a number 10, with 2 goals in 10 appearances. Yet Dortmund's plan, per Bild, is for head coach Niko Kovac to retrain him for a role that is far more defensive than the one he plays at Lubin, and to earmark him as backup to right-back Ryerson. This is not the story of a right-back signing. It is the story of a positional-conversion gamble. The context behind it is specific. In the summer, Dortmund pursued Regula, and that interest barely cooled for months. At that point the motive was an injury: new signing Giannis Konstantelias tore his ACL, and Dortmund needed an attacking option. By the winter window, the same player is being targeted for a completely different purpose — patching a defensive hole on the right. One player, two windows, two reasons. On Lubin's side, Regula's contract runs to 2028. That is the single most important commercial detail, because it gives the Polish club nearly three years of leverage to hold its price. The framing of the deal as straightforward therefore needs to be read cautiously. Köln are also said to be monitoring, adding a small variable to the negotiating table. To understand why a top German club would buy a number 10 for the right-back position, we have to leave the transfer ticker and look at the structure underneath. Start with the gap. Dortmund's right-back position has been thin for a long time. After Couto left, Ryerson was the only natural option, and when he is absent or needs rest, the club has to rotate someone else into the spot. This is the kind of problem analysts call a single point of failure — a position with only one genuine option, making the entire defensive structure dependent on one man's fitness. That gap is real, structural, and not a product of media imagination. But the solution Dortmund have chosen runs against conventional logic. When a club lacks a right-back, the natural reflex is to buy a right-back. Dortmund instead buy an attacking midfielder and plan to retrain him. This is where the geometry of the pitch starts telling the story. In the world of positional conversion, this is one of the rarest types. A winger converting to wing-back is familiar, because both roles revolve around attacking the flank and running the touchline. A number 10 converting to a defensive right-back is a far bigger leap: from the creative centre of midfield to the defensive flank, from the place with the most time and space to the place with the fastest pressure. On the data side, Regula's profile describes precisely the old role, not the new one. Two goals in 10 Ekstraklasa games is the statistic of a number 10. There is not a single professional minute at right-back to reference. In other words, Dortmund are buying a player whose public data does not prove he can do the job they need. The predictive value of that data for the target role is close to zero. The technical demands placed on a converted number 10 are heavy. A modern defensive right-back must master one-on-one defending, must have recovery pace when a winger beats him, must keep positional discipline in a back four, and — at Dortmund specifically — must take part in build-up play from deep, sometimes inverting like a midfielder. None of those skills appear in Regula's current dataset. The learning curve is therefore long and uncertain. This is where the deal should be called by its true name: it is a value-arbitrage gamble, not a signing aimed squarely at the problem. Dortmund are buying a cheap, high-upside attacking talent, then retraining him for a position of need. The sporting logic is to buy low in one market and fill a hole in another, rather than to recruit a ready-made starting right-back. At around 7 million euros, this is an immaterial investment relative to Dortmund's revenue scale, and it fits perfectly with their buy-young, develop, resell model. The third space that no one sees — but where Croatia stood for 90 minutes — is instructive here too: the space Dortmund are trying to fill is not in a position everyone can see. It sits in the gap between a left-back pushed to the right and an attacking midfielder about to be pushed to the flank. Every passage of play is a proposition; tactics are the logic of the body. And the proposition Kovac is setting out — that a number 10 can become a defensive right-back — is one that has never been proven on a pitch. The contrarian angle lies here: perhaps the very oddity of this deal is the most rational thing about it. If Dortmund genuinely believe Regula has an unusual physical profile — pace, engine, two-footedness — then converting him to full-back is not madness. It can be a low-risk gamble: if the conversion works, they have a right-back for 7 million; if it fails, they still hold a young attacking asset bought below market value. Neither branch puts Dortmund in danger. But there is an execution blind spot the media overlook. Even if Regula arrives, he arrives as a project, not a solution. Ryerson remains the only specialist option in the short term, meaning the structural hole on the right does not vanish because of one signature. Dortmund still face the same single point of failure until Regula — if he succeeds — is ready. And for a 19-year-old adapting to two things at once: a league far stronger than the Ekstraklasa, and an entirely new role, that adaptation period is unlikely to be short. A word on sourcing is needed. Of the 14 information points, only two carry a named source (Sky and Bild); the other 12 are unattributed. The framing of interest barely cooled, combined with a straightforward deal and a rival suitor (Köln), is a familiar pattern of leaks that favour the agent's side — designed to keep the player's name in the market and pressure a winter move. This does not deny the information's authenticity, but it places a ceiling on the whole story's reliability. And one commercial detail is underweighted: Regula's contract with Lubin runs to 2028. The Polish club is not a distressed seller. It can hold its price, or simply refuse. Calling the deal straightforward may therefore be understating real negotiating friction. Based on my experience following matches, conversion gambles like this are rarely priced correctly from the start — the market usually only recognises the true value after the player has logged a few hundred minutes in the new role, or after he has failed. The question to verify in the next match is not whether Regula signs, but: if he does, where does Kovac play him in the first training session, and is Dortmund simultaneously pursuing any genuine right-back? The answers to those two questions will say more than any transfer ticker about whether this is a long-term project or a makeshift fix dressed up as a gamble.