Kingsley Coman diagnosed with ankle ligament tear, out indefinitely

Early on Wednesday, Kingsley Coman was withdrawn from Bayern Munich practice after sustaining an ankle injury. The club has since determined that Coman has a capsular ligament tear in his right ankle and will be out an indefinite amount of time. They state he will miss “the early matches of the season” which is a maddeningly unhelpful amount of information.

There are two scary things here: a) ligament and b) the word indefinite. Ligament tears are scary and could be recovered from in a matter of weeks to a matter of months to the matter of never. In the case of a multi-million dollar football star I’d err on the side of weeks to months. And that’s all going to depend on which one of the six ligaments that compose the human foot Coman injured and how cautious the Bayern medical staff are.

The other part of this equation is the indefinite timeline. This isn’t an unusual injury for Bayern players. Mario Götze suffered this injury three years ago and was out for several weeks. That’s the best case scenario. On the opposite side is Bastian Schweinsteiger who suffered from this — amid other ankle injuries — chronically over the course of his career. Most of his brushes cost him two-or-more weeks but all you have to do is look at the aftermath of ossification, surgery, and the months missed on most of them to get an idea of how bad this can get.