Another crazy week at Barcelona was winding to a close when the Marc-Andre ter Stegen saga took a new and unexpected turn.
On Thursday, the 33-year-old goalkeeper — the Spanish champions’ captain — announced he needed surgery to resolve the back injury that has prevented him from training with his team-mates in recent weeks.
Ter Stegen announced it himself on X, and said, rather matter-of-factly, that he would be out for three months.
Dear Culers,
I wear the colors and jersey of FC Barcelona with great pride, whether on or off the pitch, in moments of success and in difficult times. Today is a personally difficult day for me.
Physically and athletically, I feel in very good shape, although unfortunately I…
— Marc ter Stegen (@mterstegen1) July 24, 2025
That is what has caused such a stir inside the club, prompting some members of the Barcelona board to want Ter Stegen stripped of the armband.
It’s not quite that simple, though. That decision belongs to the coach Hansi Flick and his players — every year, the skippers at Barca are decided by a team vote before the start of the season.
Nevertheless, the board members interpret Ter Stegen’s statement — with the crucial part being where he predicts exactly how long he will be out — as a challenge to the club, and one that shows he is no longer a valid link between the dressing room, the coaching staff and executives.
But this is about far more than just a tweet about a footballer having an operation.
“After my last operation on my back, I returned to the pitch after 66 days — almost two months,” Ter Stegen wrote in his statement.
“This time, the doctors believe about three months will be necessary as a precaution, to avoid any risks.”
That might look like a fairly generic post by a player who is about to have surgery — but it is not.
Club sources, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, say Barcelona were not aware Ter Stegen was about to put out that statement, let alone disclose his estimated recovery time. The club made their own statement two hours later, with no timeframe on when he would be back.
But, for reasons we will explain, it was the mention of “three months” that landed the worst.
(Marvin Ibo Guengoer – GES Sportfoto/Getty Images)
It is no secret that Barcelona are open to offloading Ter Stegen, who still has three years on his current contract, after completing the signing of Joan Garcia from neighbours Espanyol earlier this summer. The German, however, has little intention of leaving. His camp suggests that if Barcelona want to get his hefty wages off their books, they need to find a suitable buyer or pay up the remaining years of his contract as compensation.
The club knew this since the start of pre-season on July 12, when Flick and Ter Stegen had a private chat about his situation. From that point, plenty of people at Barcelona began to assume he probably wouldn’t move on this summer. That became even more likely when the club realised he had a back injury that would stop him from training with the first-team squad.
But in a way, his fitness issues threw Barcelona’s finances a lifeline.
If Ter Stegen’s bad back were to keep him out for at least four months, it would be considered long-term under La Liga’s criteria. And within the rules of the competition’s salary limit, a club with a player who has a long-term injury are permitted to use 80 per cent of his wages to register a new signing to their squad — even if the team in question are spending above their current league-imposed salary cap.
Barca are currently spending more than their salary limit, according to La Liga, so therefore cannot register new signings unless they offload money from their wage bill or have new income on the way.
It was this ‘long-term injury’ rule which allowed them to register new forward Dani Olmo last summer after defender Andreas Christensen suffered an Achilles tendon injury in August and didn’t return to action until April.
Dani Olmo (Manaure Quintero/AFP via Getty Images)
Barca believed Ter Stegen needed surgery to fix his problem and that it would keep him out at least four months, so they began to see his injury as a way of registering their new ’keeper, Garcia. So the player posting he would miss three months, not the four months they crucially need to use some of his salary elsewhere, is far from ideal from the club’s point of view.
Despite this, Barcelona believe there is scope for La Liga to consider Ter Stegen’s injury ‘long-term’. Once he has the operation, the club plan to ask multiple doctors to make their own assessments of his back. Then they will file these reports to La Liga, which has an independent medical panel, with three different doctors who make decisions on such matters. The case will be evaluated, and if La Liga’s panel feels the recovery process can be expected to take four months or more, the long-term injury exception could be granted.
Dr Pedro Luis Ripoll, a former member of the Spanish FA medical committee and a renowned traumatologist, spoke to radio network Cadena SER last week about the Ter Stegen situation.
“I believe my colleagues in La Liga, who I know, will not take the bait in that regard (as in believing Ter Stegen’s statement),” Ripoll said. “They will make the decision they have to, following their professional criteria. Imagine a footballer says his injury is going to take three weeks to heal and then things get complicated and it takes six weeks. What’s the point of the statement then?”
Ripoll also offered his own reading of the situation: “Three months seems a bit too tight. I can’t say if it will be three or four months but generally, on paper, it should be closer to four.”
This is also why Ter Stegen’s post was especially surprising to some at Barcelona. Several current executives thought it added more difficulty to their ongoing registration problems for no significant reason.
Ter Stegen had reasons to be angry at his situation, though, and over the constant narrative spinning in local media outlets over the summer, arguing why he should be leaving the club. People at Barcelona believe that, as much as he is entitled to stay at the club and want to fulfil his contract, this gesture was not appropriate from a captain, somebody who has to lead the dressing room by example and do whatever is best for the team.
He has travelled this week to Bordeaux in France, where the operation will be conducted by Dr Amelie Leglise at the Sports Clinic Bordeaux Merignac centre.
On his way to the Catalan city’s airport, Ter Stegen was filmed by local media outlet Diario Sport and asked about his situation.
“How is my back? Well, when you need to have surgery, it means it’s not working perfectly,” Ter Stegen said.
Then he was asked about his current relationship with the club: “It is all good, it always goes well.”
With Garcia now wearing the No 1 shirt that has been Ter Stegen’s since he joined the club in 2014 (Flick insists that arrangement is just for the ongoing pre-season tour to Japan and South Korea) and some key figures wanting the captaincy taken from him, that might be a little optimistic. His back is getting fixed, but it is hard to envisage how he repairs his relationship with the current board.
The Athletic contacted Ter Stegen’s camp seeking comment for inclusion in this piece.
(Top photo: Alex Caparros/Getty Images)
