SERGIO AGUERO WILL not play again for Manchester City this season and will now focus on recovering in time for Argentina’s World Cup campaign, his club manager Pep Guardiola has confirmed.
Aguero underwent keyhole surgery on his right knee in Barcelona earlier this week after he failed to fully recover from a heavy challenge by Ashley Young in City’s 3-2 derby defeat against Manchester United.
United’s shock 1-0 loss to West Brom last weekend meant City wrapped up the Premier League title with five matches to spare and Aguero, who was named in the PFA Team of the Year, will not feature again at the Etihad Stadium until 2018-19.
Asked whether the 29-year-old’s season was over, Guardiola told a news conference: “Here, yeah. It is four or five weeks. Hopefully we are going to try for him to be ready for the World Cup.
“He is in Barcelona right now for the first part of the rehabilitation.”
Aguero’s attention is now firmly fixed upon Argentina’s World Cup opener against Iceland in Moscow on June 16.
Jorge Sampaoli has ample striking options at his disposal – Gonzalo Higuain and Paulo Dybala were left out of his squad for last month’s friendlies against Italy and Spain – but City’s all-time leading scorer had looked set to be a key part of their tilt for World Cup glory in an attack led by Lionel Messi.
However, Argentina’s team doctor Homero D’Agostino said this week that he fears Aguero will struggle to be at peak fitness by the time Russia 2018 comes around.
“That a player has undergone an arthroscopy with 60 days to go before the World Cup is worrying,” D’Agostino told Radio 10.
“The recovery process will require at least five weeks. When one has old injuries, the recovery process is not as fast as one would like it to be. It’s never going to be less than three or four weeks, or even more.
“I imagine that he will not arrive 100% fit with the limited time that is left before the World Cup. The anatomy is the anatomy. The injury is what it is. He can try but I don’t think he will arrive 100%.
“The important thing is to know what he had. The doctors would have tried to resolve the issue in a conservative manner, non-surgically, but they were unsuccessful. The arthroscopy is a process that you do when there are old injuries.”
