  It is shown that in the large-N_c limit radial Regge trajectories give rise
in a natural way to the presence of the dimension-2 gluon condensate, <A^2>, in
meson correlators. We match these models to QCD and provide estimates for <A^2>
in terms of other physical quantities. In particular, in the simplest strictly
linear radial Regge model with equal residues <A^2> is proportional to the pion
decay constant squared. However, the linear model fails a consistency condition
based on matching the short- and long-distance string tensions, nor reproduces
the phenomenological values of the gluon condensates. On the contrary, in Regge
models departing from strict linearity one may reproduce both the consistency
condition and the signs of condensates. We demonstrate this in a simple
explicit model.
