“For me, it was day by day, a constant struggle,” says Manchester United defender
Lisandro Martinez says he considered quitting football after suffering a serious knee injury in February 2025.
The Argentina defender has struggled with injury problems. Since arriving at Manchester United in 2022 he has missed a combined 92 games for club and country. His latest was the most severe, an anterior cruciate ligament injury he sustained in February that required surgery and ultimately kept him sidelined for nine months.
“After the first two or three weeks, to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to play football any more,” Martinez told AFA Estudio. “Because I had already suffered the fracture in my foot, then I had the knee and I said: ‘I don’t want to know anything else.’ And then, clearly, you become more aware, you start to have that support.
Following an improvement in his outlook, Martinez was then eventually always staying around the squad, according to then manager Ruben Amorim, and providing as much support and encouragement as he could. Amorim said his energy was refreshing and it was perhaps telling that he was appointed to the Portuguese’s six-man leadership squad in the dressing room last summer despite being injured.
He returned to the pitch in November and has since recovered well enough to start games.
“You need to not take the easy way out,” Martinez said. “The easy way out is to just give up and that’s it. But I always say that it’s in the face of adversity that you show your true character. So I reconnected with myself, I reconnected with my roots, with who I am, with my values, and I gave it my all, day after day.
Regarding his rehabilitation process in those nine months, the defender known as The Butcher said: “For me, it was day by day, a constant struggle, and my match was every day at the gym.
“But I clung to the people around me, my family, my friends.”
