By: Valentina Guo

Many star players are not participating in the Women’s Soccer World Cup because a knee injury has been spreading. But it’s not just any regular knee injury. It’s been called an epidemic. “No one can say for sure why it’s happening, or how to fix it,” The New York Times said.

Megan Rapinoe, Claire Constant, and Alexia Putellas are some of the players that have been affected. They have all competed in the FIFA World Cup in the past.

On May 16th, while Constant did not hear the pop, she could definitely feel it. This had happened two months before her dream tournament that she’d been training super hard for, Yahoosports said. She “saw her knee shift and nearly blacked out. ‘NO!’ she screamed.”

She knew the dangers of what could happen, as she’s seen it occur multiple times with her own eyes.

As her teammates carried her into the locker rooms, a 23-year-old Haiti victim had just been created. Before this, she’d shrugged off injuries that hadn’t required surgery, playing through pain, reaching for the Women’s World Cup of 2023. “I think I’m OK,” she convinced herself.

The diagnosis came. ACL. She cried.

“Six of the world’s top 16 players tore an anterior cruciate ligament between June 2022 and April 2023. Five of them will miss the 2023 World Cup because of it. More than 150 top-flight players (and probably far more) have suffered the injury since last January.”, y!sports wrote.

Some players have even gone through it multiple times. Megan Rapinoe is one of them.

Having gone through this two times already, Rapinoe had only an eye-roll reaction to the potential career-ending diagnosis she was given in 2015.

For the next 9-12 months, she would undergo surgery, rehab, painstaking weeks in the gym, or, as The New York Times called it, “the slow journey back to what she had once been.”

She was more frustrated than distressed from the injury. “I was like, ‘I don’t have time for this,’” she said.

You can’t say the same for the first time, though. A 21-year-old in her sophomore year at the University of Portland, she was afraid it would all be over before it even started. A year later, when she got it again, same ligament, same knee, it was the same difficult journey back. But she persisted.

“She represented her country. She won a gold medal at the Olympics. She moved to France. She played in two World Cups. She won one of them.”, The New York Times wrote.

She had gotten the third one on her 30th birthday. “It changed for me as I got older,” she said. “That one was like an eye roll. ‘This is annoying. I know what it is going to take to come back’. But generally, I think there’s this fear. Is this going to be the end? Am I going to come back from this? Am I going to have pain forever?”

Putellas, on the other hand, has only gone through this once, and has been lucky enough to recover in time for the World Cup. She’s been the unanimous pick for the best player of her generation.

But not all were as lucky as Putellas. Many star soccer players have not been able to participate in the World Cup because of this so-called “pandemic”, but most of them, eventually, recover.