Samuel Umtiti, the 'disappeared' footballer

For over a month, no one has heard from Samuel Umtiti in Can Barça. The French central defender started conservative treatment on July 3 to solve his left knee discomfort and since that day he has not exercised with the group again. At AS we have already recorded the seriousness of the player's situation at the time of announcing that he had practically said goodbye to the season, as is being demonstrated: he has not played one more game in LaLiga and is also confirmed low for this Saturday against Naples.

“The player of the first team, Samuel Umtiti, has discomfort in his left knee and will follow a conservative treatment. He is low and his evolution will mark availability”. This is the brief statement that the club sent to the media on July 3 to argue the absence of the French central defender in training. From here, Umtiti has only been seen passing the PCR tests with the rest of his teammates because his hair has not been seen in training.

In fact, today he is the only player in the squad who does not train with the team -except for the 'rebel' Arthur Melo-, since even the Danish striker, Martin Braithwaite, who cannot play the Champions League as he is not registered in LaLiga, exercises daily with his teammates.

The seriousness of the situation of Samuel Umtiti worries and occupies greatly in the club, which has decided to definitely step forward and try to find a way out at any pricealthough the player It does not seem that he will give up the gross 12 million euros he charges tab so easily. The central one, has a contract until 2023, you will only leave if you collect the entirety of your contract. And that in the case, more than improbable given the circumstances, that he successfully passes the medical examination on his left knee of the club concerned.

Two years of ordeal

Since the summer of 2018, after winning the World Cup, when he decided to ignore the advice of the club's doctors about the need to go under the knife to solve a joint degeneration of the cartilage of his knee, things have gone from bad to worse for him. Gallic International. In fact, the data corroborates the limit situation that the plant is experiencing: He has only played 33 of the last 109 games Barcelona has played, just over 30%.

Right now nobody in the club knows for sure what will happen to Umtiti, nor the next steps that need to be done. Conservative treatment, with stem cell infiltrations in the affected area, has already proven to be one patch more than another, while the operation seems increasingly inevitable. The problem is that At 26, the central defender has already lost two years in his sports career and is on his way to retiring early if he does not decide to remedy it once and for all.