Gadi Kinda out for the year with knee surgery

Sporting Kansas City announced today that midfielder Gadi Kinda has been placed on the Season-Ending Injury List and is expected to be out for seven to nine months. Kinda has undergone an arthroscopic procedure on his right knee that will require a cartilage restoration procedure.

Per MLS rules, if a player suffers a season-ending injury, a club may place that injured player on the Season-Ending Injury List and receive roster relief (i.e., an open roster slot). Once placed on the Season-Ending Injury List, the injured player is not eligible to play for the club in any remaining competition during that MLS season including friendlies.

“The bad news is that Gadi Kinda will be moving to a season-ending injury classification,” Peter Vermes explained on the weekly press conference. “He will be out the rest of the season for 2022. The good thing, the good news is that his issue has been figured out. Tuesday he went under a sort of a prep surgery for what needs to be fixed. In the next three weeks he will go under his main surgery, that will be done out in California at some point.”

Kinda underwent knee surgery in December and was predicted to be back and playing early in the season. “It was a combination of a meniscectomy where they cleaned his meniscus a little bit and also repaired a piece of it to save it which is normal, doctors do it all the time. The only difference is when you usually do a cleanup job where you snip it and smooth it out, usually you come back a lot faster,” Vermes stated. “It’s usually anywhere between three to six weeks. Whereas when you do a repair on a meniscus, it usually takes probably anywhere between three or five months, but normally four to five, so he should have been playing by now.”

Normally when a player is healing, he will be visible at practice working on the side occasionally as he gets closer. Kinda was mostly absent when media was observing practice. “He’s had, as time has gone on, he’s gotten some pain in a part of his knee that obviously needs attention,” Vermes added. “He doesn’t have an ACL tear or PCL or LCL or MCL tear. It’s none of that, it’s not ligament damage, it was more of a bone circulation thing. The surgery that they do, they’ve done it on a lot of different people over the years, it works.”

Over the years Jimmy Medranda, Felipe Gutierrez and Alan Pulido have all had similar issues and surgeries. Kinda’s injury is different and will require a different surgery but it still led the Sporting KC staff to take a long look internally to see if they could identify a systemic issue.

“Obviously, when you have these situations happen, you start to internally just look at a lot of different things,” Vermes acknowledged. “In consulting and evaluating, this isn’t something on our medical side that has caused this. This isn’t something on the speed agility, strength, and conditioning side that’s caused this. It isn’t something that we do in training that’s caused this. It’s just part of the business. That’s part of being a professional athlete. Sometimes these things happen and unfortunately, they never come at a good time. The good thing is that we know what it is. They know what it is and we’ve got the right people to be able to fix it, and then obviously get him back to 100%.”

Kinda has played 44 matches with eleven goals and twelve assists in his two seasons prior to this year. He has also made five appearances for Israel with a goal against Montenegro in a friendly.