Dortmund Face Losing One of Their Own as Benkara Weighs Up a Fresh Start

Borussia Dortmund could be about to lose a promising young defender this summer, not through any great falling out, but simply because the path to first-team football at Signal Iduna Park is not opening up quickly enough.

Elias Benkara, who turns 19 this year, is out of contract at the end of the season, and according to BILD, both Feyenoord Rotterdam and RSC Anderlecht have registered an interest in signing him. For a teenager with genuine ambitions and a World Cup on the horizon, the appeal of regular football in the Eredivisie or the Belgian Pro League is not hard to understand.

What makes this situation a little delicate is that Benkara is not pushing for the exit. He is not agitating or issuing ultimatums. By all accounts he would be perfectly willing to stay in Dortmund if there were a credible route into the senior squad. The club, for their part, would prefer to keep him and have been exploring an extension. But wanting to retain a player and actually offering him a convincing future are two different things, and right now BVB cannot honestly promise him the latter.

The comparison with Luca Reggiani makes the situation feel sharper. The two players are the same age, yet Reggiani has already broken into the first team while Benkara is still waiting for his debut, having spent the season accumulating appearances for the under-23 side. Seventeen games, one assist, four clean sheets. Solid enough numbers, but hardly the stage a player of his ambition needs to be performing on indefinitely.

There is also an international dimension to this. Benkara, who previously represented Germany at youth level, has since chosen to play for Algeria, and he harbours serious hopes of featuring at the 2026 World Cup. That timeline makes the next twelve months particularly important for him. Sitting on the fringes of a Bundesliga squad, however prestigious, will not help his case with the Algerian selectors.

Dortmund will be hoping to find a solution. But if they cannot show Benkara a genuine path forward, and soon, the decision may well make itself.