Liverpool manager Arne Slot has confirmed Giovanni Leoni is expected to miss roughly a year after sustaining a knee injury against Southampton.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s not in a good place, of course, because he tore his ACL, which means that he will be out for around a year,\u201d Slot told his Friday morning news conference.<\/p>\n
Slot highlighted the personal and professional challenge for Leoni, who is still 18 and adapting to a new country. \u201cBeing so young, coming to a new country, playing so well in your first game… it\u2019s very hard to take the positive side. There\u2019s never a positive side, but you always try to look at the positive side, and that is that he\u2019s still so young so he has so many years still to go after he recovers from a terrible injury like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The manager pointed to the club\u2019s recent experience with similar injuries. \u201cWe have some examples with Virgil and Joe and there a lot of examples all over the world [of players coming back better],\u201d the Liverpool boss continued.<\/p>\n
Slot stressed the practical priorities for Leoni\u2019s rehabilitation. \u201cThe most important thing is the surgeons that are going to do the surgery and, second of all, the ones that do the recovery, the rehab, with him. But then it\u2019s always nice if you can do this surrounded by players who have lived through this. They can give you the right energy in certain moments and I think our players already showed in the last two days a lot of compassion towards him, and they will not stop doing that in the upcoming year.\u201d<\/p>\n
UEFA recently confirmed a change to European squad registration rules that allows clubs to replace players diagnosed with long-term injuries in Champions League, Europa League or Conference League squads. Chelsea have already used that provision, replacing injured midfielder D\u00e1rio Essugo with on-loan Facundo Buonanotte.<\/p>\n
Leoni\u2019s absence could open a place for winger Federico Chiesa, who was omitted from the original squad. \u201cWe\u2019ve looked into this,\u201d Slot said of Chiesa\u2019s inclusion. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you exactly where that process is at the moment. That is not something I do myself, but if I am informed correctly, if a player has a longer than two month injury, you are able to replace him. That\u2019s what they\u2019ve told me, now we have to see if it\u2019s true or not.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Slot says Giovanni Leoni will miss about a year after tearing his ACL; recovery will follow. Support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,172],"tags":[1073,299,1047],"class_list":["post-3102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-epl","tag-acl-injury","tag-arne-slot","tag-champions-league"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}