Report: Arthur to undergo knee surgery, could miss up to three months

Coming off a completely unimpressive first season with Juventus, Arthur Melo was surely hoping that the 2021-22 campaign would be a turn for the better during his time in Turin.

As it turns out, things haven’t started on the right foot.

Arthur’s lingering leg issue from late in the winter are back again. And while he was able to put off surgery back in February, that doesn’t look to be the case now. According to reports out of Italy on Thursday — including one from Sky Sport Italia’s Gianluca Di Marzio and another by Goal Italia’s Romeo Agresti — Arthur is set to have surgery on his lingering injury that involves lingering cartilage between his fibula and tibia in his right leg and could potentially miss up to three months as he recovers.

It has also been reported that Arthur could undergo the surgery as early as Friday.

When originally diagnosed with the injury, Arthur basically had two options: either miss a relatively short amount of time and try to see if the injury would resolve itself on its own, or to undergo surgery immediately and miss an extended period of time. Arthur chose Door 1, resulting in a month-long absence. Arthur returned to the squad in early March, but only appeared in 10 games in the final 2 ¹⁄₂ months of the season.

Now, we’ll likely have to wait around that long to see him make his first appearance for Juventus come the fall.

The 24-year-old Brazilian was on hand for Juve’s first day of training Wednesday when players reported to J Medical and underwent their respective physical exams and COVID-19 testing. Arthur, however, did not take part in Thursday’s two training sessions as Max Allegri officially began his second stint at the club with a reduced number of players due to Euro 2020 and Copa America breaks.

Now we know why Arthur wasn’t on hand to learn from Allegri for the first time.