Nico Esteves is confident Paxton Pomykal will return healthy in 2025
Nico Esteves is confident Paxton Pomykal will return healthy in 2025
The surgery was needed more than the club originally thought.
Losing anyone to a season-ending injury is never something you want to see in Major League Soccer. For FC Dallas, losing a Homegrown player to a season-ending injury also feels like a tougher pill to swallow.
On Tuesday, the club announced that Homegrown midfielder Paxton Pomykal would be sidelined for the remainder of the 2024 season.
During his weekly media call, head coach Nico Estevez confirmed the severity of Pomykal’s injury and how close it was to becoming a career-ending type of injury.
“After the game that he played against Montreal, he's still feeling some discomfort there,” explained Estevez. “We got an assessment from the on the medical side, and to be honest, the injury that he has with the knee cartilage is that is one of the worst ones because once you cannot play without pain. It means that your career could end very soon, and our fear was more like, is he gonna have to retire from this?”
Pomykal had gone through an offseason ‘clean-up’ of the cartilage after appearing in 24 games in the 2023 season. But the discomfort he was experiencing caused him to miss all of the club’s preseason before he was limited to a short six-minute appearance off the bench in the second game of the season against CF Montreal.
Estevez remained upbeat about Pomykal’s future as Dr. Bert Mandelbaum will be in charge of correcting the cartilage in his knee.
“He has done a very new type of surgery or cartilage replacement,” said Estevez. “players like (Alan) Pulido have done it, and all the ones that he has done have been successful. Paxton was very excited to hear about this new type of operation that you know could help him to keep playing soccer.”
As the club looks to regroup after losing another player to a long-term injury, they do have some options for what they can do in 2024. Estevez alluded to the recent signing of Carl Sainte from the club’s second team, North Texas SC.
“While the market is still open, it's difficult because the final player to replace someone like Paxton is really difficult,” said Estevez. “He's getting a lot of things, and we're gonna miss that. But we're looking on different positions now, not only as a central midfielder.”
I wish him the best of luck and he’s in my prayers for a full recovery, but this is the same speech that the last two head coaches gave about him as well after knee issues sidelined him.