For the US men’s national team, the injury anxiety began last weekend before the European seasons began.
Box-to-box midfielder extraordinaire Weston McKennie dislocated his shoulder in training and missed Saturday’s friendly between Juventus and Real Madrid. According to Italian reports, the first of La Gazzetta dello Sportthe USMNT star will miss at least a month.
And so began three and a half months of worry in a World Cup year like no other.
Qatar 2022 looms in November, right in the middle of the European seasons. While past World Cups have offered month-long buffers between those seasons and the start, this one offers a lonely week. Most of the 26 players that will make up the USMNT squad will play high-intensity matches eight or nine days before their World Cup debut, and weekly or bi-weekly between now and then.
So with each passing day, the severity of any injury will increase, for Americans and others. Paul Pogba, McKennie’s teammate at Juventus, limped out of a training camp last week after tearing his right lateral meniscus. Hell reportedly travel to Lyon this week to meet with Dr. Bertrand Sonnery-Cottet, a specialist in orthopedics. Together, they will decide if surgery is necessary, and not just how to optimize Pogba’s long-term recovery, but how to optimize his condition by mid-November.
For McKennie, the outlook is brighter, but the anxiety among fans is no less intense. It was triggered on Sunday morning when Gianluca Di Marzio, an Italian whistleblower with 1.7 million Twitter followers, tweeted a link to an article that included a paragraph without sources with general recovery schedules. A The Reddit user translated that to: “[Di Marzio] Weston Mckennie could be out for 3-4 months after dislocating his shoulder.”
There is no verified indication that McKennie’s prognosis is really that worrisome. Juventus doctors “reduced” the dislocated shoulder immediately after the 23-year-old suffered it. When he dislocated the same left shoulder playing for Schalke in 2019, he missed a month. The average recovery time of professional soccer players in Germany, according to injury analysis website Fussballverletzungen, was approximately two months, but with a high variation. It’s unclear if McKennie might need surgery this time.
In a normal season, such an injury would be detrimental, an unfortunate setback. In this one, though, it’s a high-stakes alarm wail. November is the turning point for any timeline. For the USMNT hopefuls, of whom only two have ever played in a World Cup, any injury that lingers beyond October will jeopardize a lifelong dream.
And the players know it, which is perhaps the most difficult thing. The surest way to lose a starting job, they also know, is to play tentatively. The surest way to spot an injury, some coaches and trainers say, is to actively try to avoid it.
However, the idea of prioritizing November instead of the present has entered some minds. Typically, “you’re always thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to train, I’m going to compete with no worries,'” USMNT center back Walker Zimmerman said in late May. This spring, “for the first time in my career, those thoughts have entered my head.”
“I think a lot of people will have in mind wanting to be healthy so they can compete in a World Cup,” midfielder Tyler Adams acknowledged in May. “It’s just the reality of the sport.”
Some players would be scared to even address that reality. Zimmerman felt it was important to confront him and “really process him.” He and other USMNT players worked with coaches, including their “mental coaches,” to do just that.
Your takeaway? “Hey, that’s not the way to go,” Zimmerman said of any potential doubts. “The mindset is, ‘How can I become the best player I can be by November?’ And to do that, you have to train hard, play hard, continue to push yourself, because that’s what got you here in the first place. … You cannot change what you have been doing.”
“You have to focus on the situation of your club until those months come,” Adams said of November and December. “And you have to hope that when that time comes, you can compete at a high level.”
So they will leave it to chance, and chance can be cruel. He already took down Miles Robinson, a would-be starting center back who he tore his Achilles tendon in May. He occasionally left the US without key players for World Cup qualifiers and ended McKennie’s 2021-22 season months early. He had recovered from a broken foot and seemed poised for a good start at Juve, only for misfortune to strike again.
Indeed, in their young careers, McKennie, Adams, Christian Pulisic, Gio Reyna, Sergiño Dest, Tim Weah and Antonee Robinson have missed dozens of games due to illness. All have had varying degrees of injury propensity.
Together, they make up a young and ambitious team that will aim for a deep run in the World Cup.
Statistically, many fans are much less likely to realize that everything will be healthy on November 21.