> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Géraldine Reuteler: The Arsenal Player We’re About to Get to Know - URL: https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/geraldine-reuteler-arsenal-women-player-profile/ - Published: 2026-09-09T16:25:14.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T18:20:53.000Z - Description: From Stans to Frankfurt, Euro 2025 and now Arsenal, this is the story of Géraldine Reuteler, the person behind the footballer. - Author: Roberto Revilla - Tags: Geraldine Reuteler, Features **BERN, EURO 2025** There’s some footage of Géraldine Reuteler from last summer that I keep coming back to. It’s from Switzerland’s game against Iceland at Euro 2025, in Bern, with the whole tournament taking place around them at home and Switzerland knowing they have to win because they had already lost their opening match against Norway. Géraldine gets the ball inside the penalty area, takes it onto her right foot and sends it across the goalkeeper into the far corner. She wheels away with her arms stretched out, screaming with joy, then jumps into the air with both fists clenched before her teammates arrive and swarm around her. There’s this massive smile on her face, and for a few seconds she looks completely unrestrained, which probably is a weird comment to make about somebody who has just scored at a European Championship in her own country in a must-win game, except that the more I’ve learned about Géraldine Reuteler, the more that particular moment has stayed with me. Because a few moments later, when Switzerland are getting ready to restart, there’s another shot of her turning towards the crowd. She raises both hands above her head and makes a heart. Then the smile disappears. Not in a bad way. She just seems to switch back into the match almost immediately. Her face becomes serious again; she’s looking around the pitch, and whatever had just happened has apparently been filed away because Switzerland still have a game to win. I think I’ve become so fond of that sequence because I started researching Géraldine expecting to find the footballer I already knew. I knew she’d been at Eintracht Frankfurt for years. I knew she could play in several different midfield and attacking positions. I’d watched her for Switzerland, remembered the European Championship and those three Player of the Match awards in three consecutive games. But knowing somebody’s name, knowing where they play and knowing that they’re very good at football isn’t really knowing them at all. The person I found underneath all that was quieter than I expected. Her family describe somebody thoughtful, someone who listens more than she speaks, somebody very close to the people she grew up with and, according to her brother Thierry, somebody who has spent quite a lot of her life being very hard on herself. Other people could tell Géraldine she was brilliant, but that didn’t necessarily mean Géraldine Reuteler would agree. For me, it makes watching that Iceland goal look at her a little differently. There she is, in the middle of a home European Championship, in front of a crowd desperately wanting Switzerland to stay alive in the tournament, and for those few seconds there is absolutely nothing restrained about her whatsoever. She’s sprinting, screaming, jumping for joy and punching the air in triumph. Then she does the heart hands towards the crowd, her face drops back into full focus mode. She turns around and gets back to work. That tournament would eventually become the point at which a much wider audience started talking about Géraldine Reuteler because Switzerland had lost their opening game against Norway and UEFA still named her Player of the Match. Pia Sundhage then moved her into a deeper role against Iceland, she scored the goal that broke the deadlock and she was Player of the Match again. Four days later, Switzerland played Finland, needing a result to reach the knockout stages of a European Championship for the first time; Géraldine created the stoppage-time equaliser and won Player of the Match for a third straight game. Three games, three different matches requiring slightly different things from her and three Player of the Match awards. I remember watching it all happen and thinking Géraldine Reuteler was having the tournament of her life. What I hadn’t realised was how late I was. Because by then she’d already been playing senior football for more than a decade. She’d played at World Cups and European Championships, spent years in Germany, come back from a serious knee injury and been named Switzerland’s Female National Player of the Year. Euro 2025 wasn’t really Géraldine Reuteler suddenly being discovered as a footballer; it was just that a lot more of us were finally noticing, and once I started going backwards through her story, I realised how much of it I simply didn’t know. I didn’t know about the little girl growing up in Stans with four brothers who wanted to be wherever they were and lasted roughly a week when her mum attempted to introduce ballet into the equation. I didn’t know that when Swiss football first identified her as someone they wanted inside their development programme, 12-year-old Géraldine didn’t want to go. I didn’t know that leaving home became so difficult that she would cry herself to sleep, or that being the only girl in all-boys’ teams sometimes meant walking into places where she had to convince people she deserved to be there before anyone was particularly interested in how talented she was. And I certainly didn’t know that this wasn’t the only time in Géraldine Reuteler’s life when football would ask her to leave somewhere she loved. So before we start wondering where Renée Slegers is going to use her, how she fits alongside [Georgia Stanwa](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/georgia-stanway-everything-you-need-to-know-about-arsenals-new-midfield-engine/)y, Mariona Caldentey, Kim Little, or [Kyra Cooney-Cross](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/kyra-cooney-cross-arsenal-women/), I think we need to go a bit further back than Arsenal, Frankfurt, or Switzerland. Back before anyone called her one of the best footballers in her country. Because if we’re going to understand the woman who wears the number 14 shirt for Arsenal now, I think we need to go back and meet the little girl from Stans first. **STANS** Géraldine grew up in Stans, in the district of Nidwalden in central Switzerland, with her mum Evelyne and four brothers, so football was already around her long before anybody outside the family had any reason to think she might one day make a career out of it. Her brothers played, and Géraldine wanted to be involved in whatever they were doing, which generally meant following them outside with a ball. She’s talked about pretty much always having one with her when she was little, and when her older brothers headed off to the football pitch she would go with them. Her mum tried to steer things in a slightly different direction. Evelyne loved ballet and decided her daughter might too, so when Géraldine was about seven, she was sent to ballet lessons. She hated it. Depending on which account you read, she lasted one or two weeks, though I don’t think it matters much because it was clearly an absolute non-starter. Géraldine has since said she simply couldn’t stand it and would much rather have been outside playing football, so Evelyne’s dreams of having a ballerina in the family ended pretty quickly. I love that story because it’s always tempting when we write about elite footballers as children to start looking for any signs at all that they were already mini professionals at six or seven years old, but Géraldine’s childhood sounds like it was just fairly normal. Or as normal as you could expect it to be when you’re a little girl surrounded by four football-playing brothers! She liked playing football because her brothers did and because it was fun. Apparently she was quite capable of getting herself into trouble as well. There’s a wonderful interview with her family from around the time of the 2023 World Cup where Evelyne says Géraldine was just as mischievous as the boys. At one point, the police brought her home after finding her cycling back from football training in the dark without any lights, initially thinking she was a boy. There was also an incident involving Géraldine, a skateboard and a slide, in what sounds like an early attempt at what we now know as a Red Bull challenge - she rode the skateboard down the slide, came off badly and ended up with a concussion, which meant Evelyne had to collect her from training and take her straight to hospital. So this very calm, thoughtful woman we see speaking in interviews has a slightly more adventurous past, which I find fascinating and reassuring. Football itself became more organised when Géraldine joined FC Stans at seven, following her brother Julien into the club. There wasn’t really an established girls’ pathway available to her at that age, certainly not anything resembling what young girls in Switzerland might find now, so she played with the boys. At the time, that didn’t seem unusual to Géraldine because she didn’t know anything else. She has said that she didn’t know another girl who played football when she was young, so if she wanted to play, boys’ football was simply where she had to do it. Growing up with four brothers probably helped, because being the only girl in the group wasn’t exactly new to her. It turns out she was good - very good, in fact. What’s funny is that her mum apparently took a bit longer than everyone else to realise quite how good Géraldine was. Evelyne has spoken about standing at one of Géraldine’s trial sessions and having other parents come over to her, talking about her daughter, asking if she understood what she had here. She didn’t, really. As far as she was concerned, Géraldine was her daughter who happened to love football. Then, by around the age of 12, Géraldine was being named the best player at an all-boys tournament, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to pretend this was simply a child who happened to enjoy kicking a ball around with her brothers for fun. Swiss football had noticed her too, and there’s a nice little contrast between the start of Géraldine’s story and what happened when she went back to FC Stans before Euro 2025. By then she was one of Switzerland’s most recognisable players, preparing for a European Championship in her own country, and she returned to the club for an event marking the twentieth anniversary of its women’s section. Around 120 girls turned up. I wonder whether if seven-year-old Géraldine had been given any insight into that future how she’d react to it. When she started, she didn’t know another girl who played football and had simply joined the boys because that was where the game was. Now she was standing at the same club, surrounded by more than a hundred girls who were there partly because players from Géraldine’s generation had helped to make the idea of a girl playing football in Switzerland become more acceptable. That’s the very definition of a Trailblazer right there! But none of that existed yet when she was 12. What existed was FC Stans, her brothers, her family, and a little girl who was extremely good at football without necessarily having decided what she wanted to do with it. Then the Swiss development programme came calling, and for the first time, being good at football was about to ask her to do something very difficult. ![Géraldine Reuteler in a promotional shot for FC Luzern](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-1-3.jpg) **Géraldine Reuteler in a promotional shot for FC Luzern* **LEAVING HOME AT 12** When the Swiss Football Association invited Géraldine into its national development programme at Huttwil, the easy story is that one of the country's most talented 12-year-old footballers had been spotted, offered the chance to join an elite pathway, and naturally jumped at it. Except that’s not what happened. Géraldine did not want to go. She was 12 years old; she was happy at home in Stans; she loved playing football, and she was very good at it, but none of that meant she wanted football to take over her life completely. Her mum seemed to understand that immediately. When the invitation arrived, Evelyne persuaded Géraldine that they should at least go and have a look, making it clear that visiting the programme didn’t mean she had to accept a place if one was offered. There’s a detail from Evelyne’s account which I think tells us a lot more than the usual story of a talented child entering an academy ever could. Privately, *both* of them were hoping Géraldine wouldn’t get in! That’s almost the exact opposite of how we’re used to hearing these stories told! Usually we get the proud parents, the huge opportunity, the child desperate to go and everyone celebrating when the acceptance letter arrives, but Géraldine and her mum apparently went into the process half-hoping somebody else would make the difficult decision for them. I can identify with this as I applied for Ride London once, hoping for a similar outcome. Unfortunately for both of them, Géraldine was far too good. She was accepted. Evelyne remembers the two of them crying and, even years later, she has spoken quite openly about how difficult that decision was. She has said she’s not completely certain she would make the same choice again knowing what she knows now, because elite athletes can end up paying a huge price for the opportunities they’re given when they’re still children. I think that’s worth considering for a moment because it changes the way you might look at this chapter of Géraldine’s story. We can look backwards from Arsenal now and make everything appear inevitable. Of course the talented 12-year-old had to enter the national programme. Of course she had to leave Stans. Of course that was the first step towards international football, Eintracht Frankfurt, and eventually Arsenal. But nobody involved was standing there in 2011 with any of that knowledge. There was just a 12-year-old football-loving girl, and suddenly her talent meant being asked to spend considerably less time with the other thing she loved spending time with the most - her family. Eventually, Géraldine decided to go. The programme was based in Huttwil, and she began living away from home with different host families, later moving with the programme to Biel, and the reality of it turned out to be every bit as hard as she and her mum had feared. She became terribly homesick. The first six months were really hard, and there are accounts from Switzerland of Géraldine crying herself to sleep because she missed home so much. This is probably the point where we need to remember just how young 12 actually is. When we talk about academy football, we get used to hearing ages attached to players, and somehow “joined the national development programme at 12” can begin to sound like just another line on a football CV. Twelve is Year Seven when you think about it in school terms. She was just a child. She’d gone from living in Stans with her mum and four brothers, playing football with people she knew and going straight home afterwards, to living with strangers, attending a different school and trying to adjust to an environment designed to develop elite footballers. Football itself wasn’t giving her somewhere particularly comfortable to hide either. During this period she moved from FC Stans into FC Luzern’s youth system, where once again she was the only girl playing in a boys’ team. Except this time there was a big difference. At Stans, Géraldine had grown up with those boys. They knew her, she knew them, and nobody needed convincing that she belonged there. At Luzern, she was walking into a new group where she barely knew anybody, and being the talented girl who had arrived through the Swiss development programme didn’t automatically make everyone delighted to see her. She has spoken about having to re-establish herself all over again, and accounts of that period describe a harsher environment where she had to prove that she deserved to be there. So while she was dealing with homesickness away from football, she was also entering a footballing environment where she couldn’t simply disappear into the group and get on with playing. She stood out like a sore thumb before she’d even touched the ball. I wonder how much that combination shaped the footballer who eventually emerged from it, because she couldn’t really choose the easy route in either part of her life. She had to learn how to be away from home at the same time as learning how to walk into a room full of boys who immediately thought she didn’t belong there, and so she had to make the football answer the doubters for her. Not because 12-year-old Géraldine was following some carefully constructed plan to become mentally stronger - she was just trying to cope and get through it. Somehow, through it all, she kept getting better. By the time she was 15, FC Luzern were ready to put her into their senior team and on 24th August 2014, Géraldine Reuteler made her first-team debut against FC Staad. Luzern won 5-1. Géraldine Reuteler scored twice. Which feels like a fairly great return on three extremely difficult years, but the more important part of the story is everything that happened before anyone got to write those two goals next to her name. Because by the time Géraldine became a senior footballer at 15, football had already asked so much more of her than simply learning how to play it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-2.jpeg) **THREE EUROS IN THREE YEARS** Once Géraldine had broken into FC Luzern’s senior team at 15, the next few years of her career became slightly crazy when you put them all together because she wasn’t really moving through the age groups in the normal way. She was racing through them faster than football could keep up with her. Less than a year after making that senior debut, she was selected by Switzerland for the 2015 Under-17 European Championship in Iceland. Géraldine was 16 years old. Switzerland had never reached the final of the competition before and they were far from arriving as favourites, but they drew their opening group game against Ireland, beat Norway and then went into the final match against France knowing they needed a result to get through. France scored after nine minutes. And this is where going back through an Under-17 tournament from more than a decade ago suddenly became much more entertaining for me than I expected, because the player who scored for France was one Elisa De Almeida. Yes, *that* Elisa De Almeida, who has just signed for Arsenal! So two girls who would eventually end up together at Arsenal were already playing against one another for their countries when they were 16. Géraldine equalised in the 66th minute, and Jolanda Stampfli scored in stoppage time to give Switzerland a 2-1 win, sending them through to the semi-finals as group winners. They then beat Germany to reach the final. And if recognising Elisa’s name had already made me stop and smile for a moment, going through the Spain team they faced in the final became ridiculous. Patri Guijarro, Aitana Bonmatí, Lucía García, Maite Oroz… and yes, I know what you’re wondering - playing at right-back was a 16-year-old Ona Batlle. So Géraldine Reuteler and Ona Batlle played against each other in a European Championship final more than a decade before they became Arsenal teammates. Spain won 5-2, and Géraldine scored Switzerland’s second goal. What matters more to me than the result, though, is the level she was already playing at. These weren’t youth players whose names disappeared a few years later. Géraldine was sharing a pitch with footballers who would go on to win Champions Leagues, World Cups and Ballon d’Ors, and even at 16 she looked completely at home amongst them. The following summer she moved up to Switzerland’s Under-19 side and went to another European Championship, this time in Slovakia. Switzerland again reached the knockout stages. France were waiting again. Géraldine clearly didn’t have any interest in making life easy for them because she scored just before half-time to put Switzerland ahead in the semi-final. France eventually came back to win 3-1 and went on to win the tournament, but by then Géraldine had played in two European Championships in two summers, reached a final and a semi-final and scored in both knockout stages. Those of you keeping up with the timeline will realise she was still only 17. Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, who was Switzerland’s senior head coach at the time and already knew Géraldine through the national development programme, certainly believed there was something different about her. Years later, she described Géraldine's relationship with the ball as a love story. She also called her a jewel. The weight of expectation hanging on this young footballer’s shoulders was becoming massive. By February 2017, Voss-Tecklenburg had brought Géraldine into the senior Switzerland squad for the Cyprus Cup, and a few months later, on 10th June, she made her full international debut against England. Then came Euro 2017 in the Netherlands, which meant that in the space of three summers, Géraldine Reuteler had gone from the Under-17 European Championship to the Under-19 European Championship and then straight into a senior one. Three European Championships in three years, at three different levels. She is now 18. Géraldine came off the bench against Austria in Switzerland’s opening game and, at 18 years and 88 days old, became the youngest Swiss woman ever to play at a European Championship. Switzerland lost that match, beat Iceland in their second and drew with France in the third, which wasn’t enough to take them through, but by that point Géraldine had gone from a 15-year-old making her first senior club appearance to playing tournament football for Switzerland’s full national team, in less than three years. What I find interesting is that none of this seems to have turned her into someone who thought she’d worked football out. It was quite the opposite. In interviews from around this period, Géraldine is very critical of her own performances, talking about what she hadn’t done well enough and what she still needed to improve. When you put that alongside what her brother Thierry would say years later about how hard Géraldine could be on herself and how difficult she sometimes found it to accept praise, you start to see something in the teenager that remains recognisable in the adult. Everyone around her could see how quickly she was progressing, but Géraldine seemed more interested in the bits that still weren’t good enough. I don’t want to pretend I know if that self-criticism helped drive her or sometimes made everything more difficult, because I’ve never met her and that would be me trying to turn somebody else’s personality into a neat explainer for their career. But I do think it matters when we get to what happened next, because by 19 years of age Géraldine had played senior international football, appeared at a European Championship and become one of the brightest young players in Switzerland. If she wanted to find out how much further she could go, the obvious next step was to leave Swiss football and test herself in a stronger league. So in the summer of 2018, Géraldine Reuteler moved to Frankfurt. And for the second time in her life, leaving home proved considerably difficult. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1504.jpeg) **FRANKFURT** When Géraldine moved to Frankfurt in the summer of 2018, it looked like the obvious next step. She was 19, already a senior international, had played at a European Championship and pretty much outgrown Swiss football. One of the biggest historic names in the women’s game, 1\. FFC Frankfurt wanted her, so this move was meant to take her career to the next level. The football part did, but leaving home was much harder. Géraldine has spoken openly about how difficult those first few months in Germany were because, once again, she was away from her family and trying to make a new place feel like home. You’ll remember that by this point she had already spent years living away from Stans through the Swiss development system, travelled all over Europe with national teams, and played senior football since she was 15. You might assume she had already learned how to be away from home by now. Apparently not. That tells us a lot about Géraldine and how important home and family have always been to her, because being older and more experienced didn’t suddenly make missing them any easier. On the pitch though, things settled down much faster. She made her Frankfurt debut in the German Cup in September 2018 and her Bundesliga debut against Wolfsburg a week later, then gradually started establishing herself in the team. This is also where we start to understand the footballer Arsenal will eventually sign, because Géraldine was already becoming difficult to categorise positionally. She could play wide, centrally, further forward, or as an eight, and her coach, Niko Arnautis, has spoken a lot over the years about the same things coming up again and again when describing her. Her understanding of space, her technical quality, running power, ability to recognise where the gaps are going to appear and move into them, and probably most importantly, the fact she could play in different roles without the level of her performance suddenly dropping off. That last bit matters, because I think “versatile” can sometimes be a lazy word in football. It can mean a player who is useful because you can stick them in three different positions and they’ll probably do a half-decent job. That doesn’t describe Géraldine Reuteler. She wasn’t simply being moved around the pitch and surviving. She understood exactly what those different jobs required, and over the next few years, Frankfurt started trusting her with more and more responsibility. She was scoring, creating, helping the team control games, and becoming one of those players who seemed to connect different parts of the side. This is probably why Arnautis later described her as not only tactically intelligent but also a leader. The club around her was changing too. In 2020, 1\. FFC Frankfurt merged into Eintracht Frankfurt, so Géraldine lived through the end of one era and the beginning of another while she was still developing. I find that interesting because she arrived in Germany as a homesick 19-year-old trying to work out whether she could settle down somewhere new, and over time she became part of a club going through its own version of the same process. A new identity, a new structure, and trying to work out what it wanted to become. Géraldine has since said she feels she grew alongside the club, which probably helps explain why their relationship became so strong. Somewhere along the way Frankfurt stopped feeling like the place she had moved to and started feeling like home. That matters when we get to what happened next. By 2021, Géraldine wasn’t just the exciting young Swiss player anymore. She was becoming one of the people Frankfurt could properly build around; she had established herself in the Bundesliga, and all those different parts of her game were starting to come together. Then in March, during a training session, she injured her left knee. She tore her anterior cruciate ligament and damaged the lateral ligament as well. And just like that, everything stopped. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-3-1.jpg) **349 DAYS** On 29th March 2021, Géraldine Reuteler was training with Frankfurt when she suffered the injury that every footballer fears. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee and also damaged the lateral ligament. If you follow women’s football regularly, you don’t need me to explain what those three letters mean because unfortunately we’ve all become far too familiar with ACL injuries in the women’s game. We see the announcement from the club, and we know immediately that the player is going to be out for months; then, over time, we start getting the familiar sequence of updates. The photograph after surgery, then another one in the gym; eventually she’s running outside again on the training pitch; somewhere down the line a football joins her; and then, eventually, hopefully, we get the picture of her back in full training with her teammates. From where we’re sitting, the whole thing looks like a fairly common series of events, and we often forget about the injured player because we get distracted by the current reality of following our team week in week out throughout the season. For the footballer actually living through it, there’s absolutely nothing routine about losing almost a year of your career. For Géraldine, that's 349 days between suffering the injury and playing another competitive match for Frankfurt. The rehabilitation wasn’t completely straightforward either. She later talked about the knee causing more problems than she had expected and the recovery taking longer than she had originally hoped, so there wasn’t simply a nice straight line running from having surgery to getting back onto a football pitch. There were setbacks, frustrations, and all the uncertainty that comes with spending month after month working towards something without knowing exactly when your body will finally let you do it again. I’m always uncomfortable when serious injuries get turned into tidy little stories about overcoming adversity and personal growth, because I doubt Géraldine was lying there after tearing her ACL thinking this would be a great opportunity to work on her inner self. I guess she’d have much preferred to keep playing football. But Géraldine has talked about the experience changing her in certain ways. She became much more aware of what her body was telling her and learned to listen to it differently, which makes complete sense after an injury where suddenly every little sensation in the knee probably takes on a lot more significance than it ever did before. More interestingly, she has also said she became more open and more self-confident during that period. Bearing in mind what we’ve already learned about the younger Géraldine, the girl who could be incredibly hard on herself and wasn’t always very good at accepting praise, I find that part quite interesting. Although maybe the thing that tells us the most about this stage of her life isn’t something Géraldine did at all - it’s what Frankfurt did. In January 2022, Géraldine still hadn’t played a competitive match for almost ten months. She was slowly working her way back to full training, and Frankfurt still had no real evidence of what version of Géraldine Reuteler they'd get when she returned. But they gave her a new contract anyway. I think that tells you pretty much everything about the relationship which had developed between player and club. Four years earlier she’d arrived in Frankfurt as a homesick 19-year-old, desperately missing Switzerland and trying to work out if somewhere unfamiliar could ever feel comfortable. Now she was injured, unable to play, and Frankfurt was effectively telling her that none of that changed how much they valued her. By this point, Géraldine described the club as her second family. Remember the girl who didn’t want to leave Stans at 12? She’d somehow managed to build another home. Then, on 13th March 2022, 349 days after damaging her knee, Géraldine was named among the Frankfurt substitutes for their Bundesliga match against SGS Essen. And despite already having played senior international football, the European Championships, and years of Bundesliga football by this point, she admitted she was nervous from the moment she found out she was in the squad. Those nerves apparently got worse when Niko Arnautis eventually turned around and told her she was going on. I love that. We tend to imagine the big emotional part of returning from an ACL injury is the crowd applauding and singing your name when you walk back onto the pitch, but before any of that there’s Géraldine Reuteler sitting on the bench thinking, oh my God, he’s actually going to throw me on now. She came on for the final few minutes. Frankfurt won, and Géraldine Reuteler was a footballer once again. Two weeks later, Wolfsburg came to Frankfurt. Géraldine started on the bench again, came on and scored from long range. Frankfurt eventually lost the game 4-1, so unfortunately it wasn’t the perfect comeback story, but after almost a year without competitive football, I guess Géraldine seeing the ball hit the back of the net mattered considerably more than writing perfect headlines for people. A couple of weeks after that she pulled on a Switzerland shirt for the first time in more than a year, returning for her country against Romania. Suddenly something which must have looked extremely unlikely for much of the previous 12 months was beginning to become possible. Euro 2022 was only a few months away, and Géraldine Reuteler was going to make it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1502.WEBP) **BACK TO THE BIG STAGE** Making it back onto the pitch in March was one thing. Being ready for a European Championship in July was something else entirely. Géraldine had missed almost a full year of competitive football and Switzerland were heading to England for Euro 2022 with very little time for her to build anything resembling a normal rhythm again. But she made it. If you go back through that tournament knowing what the previous fifteen months had looked like for her, one moment in particular stands out. Switzerland went into their final group game against the Netherlands knowing they had to win to have any chance of reaching the quarter-finals. After a goalless first half, the Dutch scored almost immediately after the restart. Four minutes later, Ramona Bachmann got down the left and pulled the ball back into the area. Géraldine arrived onto it and finished first time. One-one. For a little while at least, Switzerland were still alive in the tournament. The Netherlands eventually pulled away and won 4-1, so there wasn’t some big Hollywood ending waiting for us, but I don’t think there needs to be. Fifteen months earlier, Géraldine had been lying on a training pitch with a torn ACL. Now she was back, scoring at a European Championship. That’s more than enough. What came afterwards is probably more important anyway, because once she had got through the injury and properly re-established herself, the next few years weren’t really about getting back to the footballer she had been before. She was becoming an even better one. All those different parts of her game were beginning to come together. The technical ability everybody had seen when she was a teenager, the tactical understanding Frankfurt had developed. The ability to play in different positions without disappearing from the game, her running power, her intelligence around space, and increasingly, the confidence to affect matches herself rather than always being the player who helped somebody else do it. The 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand gave us another glimpse of both sides of Géraldine. She started all four of Switzerland’s matches as they won their group without conceding a goal before eventually losing to Spain in the last 16. But some of the best stories around her from that tournament had almost nothing to do with football. Her parents and two of her younger brothers travelled all the way to New Zealand to watch her, and when Géraldine was asked what it meant to have them there, she talked about how important it was simply being able to go over to them after a game and hug them. Which, after everything we already know about how difficult she found being away from home when she was younger, feels very Géraldine. Football had taken her literally to the other side of the world; her family had followed. Actually, if you want to understand how important they are to her, you don’t even have to rely on what she says in interviews because she has quite literally had them written all over herself. Géraldine likes tattoos - quite a lot, as it happens. By Euro 2025, she had somewhere around 22 of them, which apparently is already more than her mum thinks is strictly necessary, although Géraldine doesn’t seem so concerned about stopping. Her first came when she was 16, which meant she still needed Evelyne’s permission. Her mum agreed because the tattoo was about the family. Since then, she’s added the birthdays of her younger twin brothers, the birthdays of her older brothers, her mum’s star sign, her dad’s birthday and the birthday of one of the closest friends she made while she was living away from home at school in Biel. She and her mum also have a matching tattoo. That first one included the initials of family members, a French phrase about family being a priceless gift, and the number eight. Eight was the house number of the family home where she grew up. I really like that detail, because when you go back to the beginning of Géraldine’s story, the tattoos stop feeling like some random personality detail you add to a player profile to make it more interesting. This is someone who left home at 12 and found it desperately difficult, then left Switzerland at 19 and struggled with homesickness again. Everywhere she has gone since, she has carried small reminders of the people and place she came from. I’m not going to sit here and tell you exactly what her tattoos mean, because I know how deeply personal they are to me when I look at my own, but when someone repeatedly tells you how important her family is and then appears to have half the family tree tattooed on her body, I think we’re probably safe taking the hint. Another tattoo caught my attention for a slightly different reason. She has an English phrase on her thigh which is basically a reminder that the world is bigger than whatever is going on inside her own head. I’m going to be careful here because I have no intention of psychoanalysing Géraldine Reuteler on the basis of something she’s had written on her leg. But it becomes interesting when you put it alongside what her brother Thierry has said about her. He has described Géraldine as someone who has always been very self-critical and who, for a long time, found it difficult to accept compliments or recognise how good she was. Thierry thinks that’s changed as she’s got older. He has talked about her becoming more confident, learning to accept praise a bit more and, interestingly, becoming slightly more selfish on the pitch when she needs to be. That last part matters. Because for years Géraldine had been valued partly because she could do so many different jobs for everyone else. By the time we get into 2024 and 2025, she was starting to look more like a player who was willing to decide things herself. You can see it in the numbers as well; in the 2024/25 Bundesliga season she scored ten goals and added six assists in 20 league appearances, comfortably the most productive league campaign of her career. She later described that period as the best football she had played. In January 2025, she was named Switzerland’s Female National Player of the Year for the first time. So by the time Euro 2025 came around, Géraldine wasn’t simply fit again. She wasn’t simply back to where she had been before the ACL. She was arriving at a home European Championship playing the best football of her life - and over the first three matches, a lot more people were finally going to realise it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1503.jpeg) **A REUTELER WONDERLAND** Euro 2025 was being played at home in Switzerland, which already meant Géraldine would get more attention than usual. Her family were there, her country was watching, and she was coming into the tournament playing the best football of her career. Then Switzerland lost their opening game. Norway beat them 2-1 in Basel, despite Switzerland taking the lead through Nadine Riesen, so not exactly the start a host nation dreams of when the whole country is desperate to get behind you. But Géraldine was excellent. UEFA named her Player of the Match despite the defeat, which tells you quite a lot about the performance because it’s never easy to stand out that much when your team has just lost. What interests me is why she got the award. The technical observers weren’t simply talking about the attacking bits. They highlighted her work without the ball as well: the recovery runs, winning possession back, and how involved she was in pretty much everything Switzerland were trying to do. So even in defeat, she had already become one of the central figures in the tournament for them. Then came Iceland and Switzerland knew they *had* to win. Lose again and their home European Championship was effectively over before it had really got going. Pia Sundhage changed Géraldine’s role; against Norway she had played higher up the pitch, but against Iceland Sundhage moved her deeper into central midfield. This is where I think the tournament becomes really interesting if you’re trying to understand Géraldine as a footballer, because we keep coming back to the question of what position she actually plays. Against Iceland, she played as an eight; she received the ball deeper, helped Switzerland move through midfield, played through the lines, made interceptions, and got involved much earlier in attacks. But being asked to play deeper didn’t mean she suddenly stopped getting forward - in the 76th minute, Sydney Schertenleib turned in midfield, saw Géraldine making the run and played her through. Géraldine took the ball with her left foot, shifted it onto her right and finished across the goalkeeper into the far corner. Now we’re back at that moment from the beginning. The sprint away. The scream. The jump. The fists. The heart hands towards the crowd. Then straight back into full concentration mode. Switzerland went on to win 2-0, and Géraldine was named Player of the Match again. What I find particularly interesting is that UEFA were praising different parts of her game this time. Against Norway, they had highlighted her attacking influence and work winning the ball back. Against Iceland, they talked about her line-breaking passes, interceptions, movement through midfield, and the run she made for the goal. Two matches. Two different roles. Player of the Match in both. Then came Finland. Switzerland knew a draw would take them into the quarter-finals of the European Championship for the first time in their history. For most of the night it stayed goalless, but then, with ten minutes left, Finland were awarded a penalty. Natalia Kuikka scored and Switzerland were suddenly going out of the tournament. This is the point where I need to be careful not to make Géraldine the hero of every single scene just because this is her story. Switzerland were throwing everything forward. Lia Wälti was trying to drive them on, the crowd were getting desperate, players were committing bodies into the box and Riola Xhemaili was eventually the one who scored the goal. But Géraldine was involved again - deep into stoppage time she got into the penalty area from the left and sent the ball across goal. Xhemaili arrived and turned it in. One-one. Switzerland were through! And Géraldine Reuteler was named Player of the Match AGAIN. Three games. Three slightly different jobs. Three Player of the Match awards. This wasn’t a player who was simply having a good week - Géraldine was starting to look like one of the most complete footballers at the tournament. Lia Wälti certainly seemed to think so. When she was asked about Géraldine during the Euros, she described her as a complete player. Someone who understood the game really well, worked defensively, carried a goal threat and had qualities you didn’t see very often. I think “complete” is probably a much better word for Géraldine than “versatile”, because versatile can still sound like a player you move around because she can cope with different jobs. “Complete” suggests that wherever you put her, she actually understands how to influence the game from there. That feels much closer to what Switzerland were getting from her. Their tournament eventually ended against Spain in the quarter-finals, which is hardly embarrassing given the level of opposition, but by then Géraldine had already made her point. She’d been playing senior football for more than ten years, been an international since she was 17, already been to World Cups and European Championships. Nothing about Géraldine Reuteler the footballer was suddenly new - what changed was the number of people paying attention. Some players in that Switzerland squad had been much more publicly recognisable for years. Lia Wälti was the captain and one of the faces of Swiss football; Ramona Bachmann and Ana-Maria Crnogorčević had enormous international careers behind them. Sydney Schertenleib arrived as one of Europe's most exciting young players. Alisha Lehmann had public recognition that went far beyond football. Géraldine Reuteler had spent most of her career just quietly getting better. Playing different roles, putting the work in, helping teams to function, improving without making a load of noise about it. Then Euro 2025 happened, and suddenly it became impossible not to notice her, which makes what happened next quite funny. Because while loads of us were sitting there discovering Géraldine Reuteler during that tournament for the very first time, Arsenal had already found her. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-6.jpg) **ARSENAL HAD ALREADY FOUND HER** Arsenal’s interest in Géraldine goes back to at least the summer of 2025, which means we shouldn’t look at what happened during that European Championship and imagine three Player of the Match awards suddenly sent someone at London Colney scrambling to get her phone number. They already knew about her. [Renée Slegers](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/renee-slegers-arsenal-women-2026-27/) had already spoken to Géraldine and there had been conversations about bringing her to Arsenal before she played what would eventually become her final season in Frankfurt. Then, quite conveniently, Arsenal and Eintracht Frankfurt played each other in a pre-season friendly that August. Think about that from Géraldine’s point of view for a second. You’ve spent seven years in Frankfurt, Arsenal have already expressed an interest in signing you, you’ve spoken to their manager, and then the next thing you know, you’re lining up against the team you know might be trying to bring you to England. Géraldine has since admitted she was quite nervous before that game because of those conversations, which I like given that we’re talking about someone who had just spent a European Championship being named the best player on the pitch three games in a row. Apparently playing Arsenal felt different. What she says happened afterwards is more interesting, because she came away from that match thinking that one day she really wanted to play for them. There were already people pulling her towards the club too. Lia Wälti had spent seven years at Arsenal and Géraldine knew Noëlle Maritz as well, so she’d been hearing about the place for years from Swiss teammates who actually knew what living in England and playing at Arsenal was like. That matters, I think, because Arsenal wasn’t just some enormous club she was admiring from a distance. She knew people close to her who had lived it; she’d spoken to Renée; she’d played against the team, and she could start imagining herself there. But the move didn’t happen. Frankfurt didn’t want to lose her; Géraldine still had another year left on her contract, and Arsenal just couldn’t get the deal done. So she went back to Germany, and this is another part of her story I like because she didn’t spend that final season moping around waiting for her contract to run out. She was still one of Frankfurt’s most important players. By this point she was part of the leadership group and serving as vice-captain. She started 24 of her 25 Bundesliga appearances, scored seven league goals, added six assists and, across all competitions, Frankfurt credited her with nine goals and eight assists from 34 matches. By the time she left, she had made more than 180 competitive appearances for the club and scored more than 50 goals. That is a lot of football for one club. The young woman who had arrived at as a homesick 19-year-old who and eight years later she was vice-captain, and one of the most celebrated players in the club’s history. That’s quite a journey. So when Arsenal came back for her in 2026, Géraldine wasn’t leaving because Frankfurt had stopped working for her. She wasn’t trying to escape a bad situation and she wasn’t looking for somewhere to rescue a career that had fallen flat. It was exactly the opposite - Frankfurt was comfortable, familiar. It was home. They had supported her through the ACL injury, trusted her when she couldn’t play, helped her develop and given her more responsibility as she grew older. She knew the league, knew the city, knew the coach and knew exactly where she fit. Staying would have been the easiest thing in the world. And this is where her decision to leave becomes much more interesting; Géraldine has been surprisingly open about what she was looking for by then. She wanted more competition. She felt the WSL was stronger than the Bundesliga, and she wanted to be in an environment where international players were everywhere, where there were no easy places on the team, and where she would have to reach a really high standard every single day just to play. She believed that could make her better. Not just for Arsenal, but for Switzerland as well with another World Cup ahead of her. Suddenly, when you put that next to everything we’ve already learned, the move starts to feel like more than just a transfer. At 12, Géraldine left home because Swiss football had decided she was too talented to stay where she was. At 19, she left Switzerland to find out how far she could go; she needed a stronger league. At 27, nobody was making her leave anything. She was vice-captain at Frankfurt, established, successful and completely comfortable. This time, she chose to make herself uncomfortable - not because she was unhappy, but because she still wanted to find out how much better she could become. I think that’s probably the point where I started understanding the Arsenal move in a very different way to how I thought I understood it previously. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1494-1.jpeg) **SO WHAT FOOTBALLER HAVE ARSENAL ACTUALLY SIGNED?** If you’ve watched Géraldine during pre-season and found yourself wondering exactly what sort of midfielder [Arsenal have signed](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/geraldine-reuteler-why-arsenal-women-have-signed-a-bundesliga-diamond/), you’re not alone, because I’ve been doing exactly the same thing. Part of the problem is that we instinctively want the answer to be a certain position. We want to say she’s an eight, or a ten, or someone who can play out wide, put her little magnetic counter somewhere on the tactics whiteboard and move on. Géraldine has spent most of her career making that difficult. She’s played wide, centrally, higher up the pitch and deeper in midfield, and what Euro 2025 showed us really well is that changing her position doesn’t necessarily change her influence on a game. Against Norway she played higher up the pitch and was Player of the Match. Against Iceland, Pia Sundhage moved her deeper to the base of the midfield, and she was Player of the Match again. Then the game versus Finland required something slightly different and somehow she ended up with the award for a third time in a row. So I don’t think the more interesting question is where she plays-it’s what she understands. Géraldine herself does have a preferred position, though. She sees herself as an eight, a box-to-box midfielder. Interestingly, that’s just how Renée Slegers described her when they first spoke about her coming to Arsenal. Renée told her she saw her as a box-to-box midfielder and believed that profile would fit the way Arsenal wanted to play, which immediately becomes more interesting when you look at what we’ve started to see from this Arsenal team system-wise during pre-season and now into the opening weekend of the season (even though Géraldine wasn’t in the squad against the first match against Brighton). There’s a lot of movement. Players aren’t simply standing in fixed positions waiting for the ball to find them. One player moves out of an area, someone else recognises the space, another player fills the next gap, and suddenly the shape you were looking at five seconds earlier doesn’t really exist anymore. That feels almost tailor-made for a player like Géraldine - she understands space, and she sees where the gaps are going to appear. She can receive the ball deeper, move it through midfield, carry it herself, break a line with a pass and then keep moving so she arrives somewhere useful at the other end. Which, now I think about it, sounds suspiciously like I’ve just explained what a midfielder does. The difference is being able to do all of those things at Arsenal level. There’s also the running - a lot of running. That’s something coaches and teammates have repeatedly mentioned throughout Géraldine’s career, and when you watch her properly, you start noticing how much ground she covers without necessarily looking like she’s charging around the pitch. She moves into spaces early; she arrives rather than reacts. And because she has played in so many different roles, she seems to understand what the players around her are trying to do as well. That might be one of the most useful things about her in Renée’s Arsenal. If Mariona Caldentey moves out of one area, Géraldine can recognise the space she has left. If a full-back goes high, she understands what needs protecting behind them. If Arsenal win the ball and there’s space ahead, she can carry it, and if there isn’t, she can help connect the next phase instead. To me, that’s so much more interesting than simply saying she’s versatile, and I know I used that word to describe her just before we signed and in the short profile I did on her afterwards. We’ve already established today that the word “versatile” can sometimes mean someone you trust to fill in, but Géraldine Reuteler is absolutely not a fill-in player. She’s a footballer who seems to understand several versions of the game at once. Then there are the goals! 10 Bundesliga goals in 20 appearances in 2024/25 from a player who isn’t an out-and-out forward is a very healthy return, and she followed that with another 7 league goals in her final season at Frankfurt. The Iceland goal is probably the perfect example of why. She started the move deeper in midfield, kept moving, recognised the space opening ahead of her, made the run and finished it off herself. She doesn’t need to start next to the striker to end up somewhere extremely inconvenient for the opposition. Arsenal will need that. Alessia Russo can’t be expected to carry the goalscoring burden on her own, and one of the encouraging things about this squad is that there are now potential goals coming from all over the pitch. Georgia Stanway, Frida Maanum, Mariona Caldentey. Kyra Cooney-Cross has also reminded us that shooting from another postcode is also acceptable. [Olivia Smith](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/olivia-smith-pfa-young-player-of-the-year-arsenal/), [Lisa Baum](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/why-lisa-baum-might-be-arsenal-womens-most-interesting-signing-so-far/), [Selina Cerci](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/selina-cerci-arsenal-player-profile/), [Caitlin Foord](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/why-arsenal-women-still-trust-caitlin-foord/), Stina Blackstenius- I could keep going; we had so many different goalscorers in pre-season! Then we have Géraldine Reuteler, who has spent the last couple of seasons becoming much more productive herself. Which brings us to the slightly ridiculous problem Renée has now - there are only eleven places in the team. I checked, just in case she’d found some sort of loophole during the summer. Kim Little is still Kim Little. Georgia Stanway hasn’t come to Arsenal to sit and admire the midfield from the bench. Mariona is one of the best footballers in the world and appears to regard fixed positions as more of a general concept. Kyra is back. Frida too and she gives Arsenal something different again. And Géraldine has just left the comfort of Frankfurt specifically because she wanted to put herself into an environment where she’d have to compete with players exactly like these ladies every single day. So I don’t think we’re going to spend this season talking about one definitive Arsenal midfield and I’m not sure Renée wants us to. Some games will have Géraldine starting, and others won’t. There will be matches where she plays as the eight she prefers and others where something Renée wants tactically takes her somewhere else - and that’s probably the point. Maybe Géraldine Reuteler isn’t here to occupy one particular position in this Arsenal team. Maybe she’s here because Renée wants to be able to build several different versions of Arsenal, sometimes within the same game, and Géraldine is one of those players who allows her to do it. Which makes it rather fitting that after spending most of her career being difficult to categorise, the thing Arsenal may value most about her is that they don’t have to. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/DSC00627.JPG) **THE WOMAN WEARING NUMBER 14** The more I’ve learned about Géraldine over the last few days, the less interested I’ve become in reducing her simply to where Renée Slegers might put her on a tactics board. Obviously I still want to know! I’ll absolutely be watching the team sheets this season and wondering whether she’s going to start as the eight, whether Mariona is moving somewhere else, whether Georgia Stanway is placed deeper, and whether Géraldine is going to appear in a completely different part of the pitch five minutes later. That part of following Arsenal isn’t going anywhere. But I don’t really want these player profiles to end with us simply knowing more football facts. I want us to watch the player differently afterwards. That’s the bit I enjoy the most. So when Géraldine Reuteler walks out wearing that number 14 shirt for Arsenal, I’m not only going to see the midfielder we signed from Eintracht Frankfurt. I’m going to think about that little girl in Stans who followed her four brothers around with a football and lasted approximately five minutes when her mum tried to turn her into a ballerina. I’m going to remember that 12-year-old who didn’t actually want to leave home when the Swiss development programme came calling, and the fact that both she and her mum were privately hoping she wouldn’t get accepted. I’ll remember how desperately homesick she became, the host families, the different schools and then walking into FC Luzern as the only girl in a boys’ team where nobody particularly cared that she was supposed to be talented until she proved it to them herself. The 15-year-old who made her senior debut and scored twice. The 18-year-old who somehow had played three European Championships at three different levels and become Switzerland’s youngest-ever player at a senior Euros. Eintracht Frankfurt. Another move away from home and another period of extreme homesickness. Except this time, the place she initially struggled to settle into eventually became somewhere she would later describe as her second family. That part matters even more now knowing how the story eventually ended there. Frankfurt weren’t simply the club she happened to play for before Arsenal. They trusted her; they gave her another contract while she was still recovering from a devastating ACL injury. They watched her come back after 349 days, saw her grow into one of the team's senior players, and eventually made her vice-captain. Eight years. More than 180 appearances. More than 50 goals. That’s a huge chunk of somebody’s life. And then there’s the family, because they never seem to be very far away whenever you look properly at Géraldine’s story. Her parents and brothers travelling to New Zealand for the World Cup. Her talking about how much simply being able to hug them after a match meant. The tattoos: her brothers’ birthdays, her parents. The number eight from the front door of the family home in Stans. Even one of the closest friends she made while she was away at school in Biel. Football has taken Géraldine all over the place, and she spent a lot of that time making sure home always travelled with her. Then there’s the more complicated part of her - the self-criticism, her brother Thierry saying that she struggled for years to accept compliments or acknowledge how good she was. The young player surrounded by people calling her a jewel while she was more interested in everything she still needed to improve upon. And then, slowly, the change. More confidence. More willingness to accept praise. A little more selfishness on the pitch, in the right way. 10 Bundesliga goals, Switzerland’s Female National Player of the Year, Euro 2025. And now I think we can go back to that video from Bern for one last time today. Because when I first watched Géraldine score against Iceland, I just saw a brilliant footballer scoring an important goal for her country. But now I see the little girl who didn’t want to leave Stans, the teenager who had to keep proving she belonged, the 19-year-old who found moving abroad difficult all over again. The player who spent almost a year trying to get her knee working properly, the woman whose family had followed her around the world. The footballer who spent years being extremely hard on herself and was now standing in Bern, in front of a home crowd, screaming with joy after scoring at a European Championship. Then, a few seconds later, she makes the heart with her hands; her face changes. Back to the game, back to work. Maybe that’s why I’ve grown so fond of that little piece of footage - it feels like we’re seeing both versions of Géraldine Reuteler at exactly the same time. The quiet, thoughtful, very private person we’ve been learning about and then, on the other side of the coin, the elite footballer who has spent most of her life pushing herself into increasingly difficult places to find out what she can do. Then, at 27 years old, just when she had finally reached somewhere completely comfortable in Frankfurt, she decided to do it again. Nobody forced her; nobody pushed her out. She didn’t need rescuing. She wanted to know if she could still become *even* *better*. So she came to Arsenal. That’s the thing I’ll remember most when I see that number 14 now - not just that Arsenal have signed a very good midfielder, or that she might give Renée several different tactical options. But that after everything Géraldine Reuteler has already done in football, she still seems curious enough to find out what else might be possible. I think that makes me even more excited to watch what happens next.