Martin Ødegaard Diagnosed With Patellar Tendinopathy

A couple days back, Real Sociedad officially confirmed that Martin Ødegaard has been suffering from patellar tendinopathy, which must have been what Imanol Alguacil was referring to when he said: “He [Ødegaard] has been dealing with the injury since October and has even played with pain.”

Today, a Real Sociedad doctor (Javier Barrera) discussed Ødegaard’s injury at greater length:

He has patellar tendinopathy in his right knee. It is a heavy injury that does not have 100% effective treatment. We have been testing what we had at our disposal: physical therapy, personalized exercise programs, regulating loads for training and games...We have talked with more people to see what can be done. The first weeks after confinement he was better, but against Real Madrid it hurt again and he played against Celta with discomfort. We have gone to Barcelona to explore another type of treatment with a specialist and are looking to avoid the operating room, something that we are not contemplating now. In the short term, we want him to be able to play while taking care of training loads and using physical therapy, taking into account his needs and the needs of the coach.

The revelation that Ødegaard has been suffering through a chronic condition over the course of a season is terrible news and the eyes of the Madridista community are now on Real Sociedad’s medical team to see how they handle a very serious problem.

If you remember, Cristiano Ronaldo suffered from tendinopathy (what was previously termed tendinosis) towards the end of the 2014 season, limiting his effectiveness in the Champions League Final and World Cup and visibly affecting his agility and dribbling ability in the long term.

It remains to be seen whether that will happen with Ødegaard, but there is no use speculating (especially without in-depth medical knowledge) given the variety of different contextual factors between the Norwegian and Portuguese superstar.

We’ll just have to wait and see.