Soccer stars are under too much pressure to recover from ACL injuries
This past week, New York Knicks wunderkid Kristaps Porzingis tore his ACL while dunking in a game at Madison Square Garden. As he clutched his knee is obvious pain, the nearly 20,000 fans in attendance fell silent as it became immediately clear how severe the injury was to the team’s most exciting star in the three decades since they drafted Patrick Ewing.
When the diagnoses was released, Knicks fans suddenly had their greatest fear come to fruition; the Latvian big man is set to miss 12 months as he recovers from the worst-case-scenario injury.
On the other side of the world, Faouzi Ghoulam was ramping up his recovery from the same injury. He had been hoping to set back into Napoli’s lineup to help his club win the Scudetto. However, on Friday he also went down in pain, again, clutching his right knee; the one with the ACL he ruptured back in November. It’s suspected that he’s suffered a broken kneecap and is set for another lengthy spell in the recovery room.
Soccer has a strange medical phenomenon whereby ACL injuries seem to entail a shorter expected recovery timeline than the rest of the world. Whereas it was immediately understood that Porzingis, and multitudes of players in other American sports, require a year to recover, someone like Ghoulam, or Alessandro Florenzi last season, are expected to return during the same season.
Only months after tearing his ACL, Roma’s versatile future captain re-tore it while pushing himself in a rehab match with the Primavera. In fact, he even warned Ghoulam about taking it easy when the Algerian first suffered the injury.
In a sport that is more reliant on legs than any other in the world, it should be incumbent upon doctors and team medical staff to prevent players from pushing recoveries too hard. There shouldn’t be pressure on players to recover faster than any other athlete in modern sports. Yet, with Ghoulam today, we have another soccer star who’s set to miss more time than initially thought because he tried too hard to meet that expected timeline.