“Patience,” says Tyrell Malacia with a smile. That, more than anything else, is what he has learned over the past 535 days. “I have a lot of patience but, in this process, I learned that I have more patience than every other person in the world at this moment.”
For it is now 535 days — the best part of a year and a half — since his most recent first-team appearance as a Manchester United player, in a 2-1 win against Fulham on the final weekend of the 2022-23 Premier League campaign.
Malacia played 39 times for United in all that season, more than expected for someone who joined the previous summer as left-back cover. But the very first signing of the Erik ten Hag era proved a reliable, dependable presence, often starting ahead of first-choice Luke Shaw. “I didn’t expect me to do less because I know what I can do,” he says.
Malacia ended that season satisfied with how he had adapted to the rigours of English football.
The only problem was, towards the end of that debut year, he felt some discomfort around his left knee. It was not a major issue initially, but still now, 535 days later, it is the reason why Malacia has made those 39 appearances and no more.
During that time, he has rarely been seen in public. He has stayed quiet on social media. His return has been delayed and then delayed again. With his extended absence largely unexplained, Malacia became the subject of wild speculation on social media, some of it outlandish, some of it bordering on defamatory.
But after many months of recovery and rehabilitation, he played the first half for United’s under-21s away to Huddersfield Town of League One in the EFL Trophy on Tuesday.
He is finally close to being back.
Malacia is closing in on a return to United’s first team (Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)
Has he visualised the moment when he walks out as a United player at Old Trafford again?
“Every day since the injury,” he says. “What does it look like? Just being there… enjoying the pitch, the ball, the fans, my team-mates, everything. Pulling my boots on, pulling the shirt on of Man United and being out there.”
The problem was a tear in Malacia’s left meniscus — the piece of cartilage that cushions the knee joint, preventing your thigh and shin bones from grinding against each other. But while it was causing him some uneasiness towards the end of that 2022-23 season, it was manageable.
After being an unused substitute during the FA Cup final defeat to Manchester City the weekend after that Fulham appearance, he joined up with the Netherlands on international duty and played in their Nations League semi-final defeat against Croatia, in his home city of Rotterdam.
There was hope a few weeks of rest in the off-season would clear any lingering niggles up. But they didn’t. “When I came back from vacation, I did my runs and I felt the same issues again,” he says.
Together, Malacia and United’s medical department decided surgery was the best course of action. As the rest of the squad got ready to embark on a pre-season tour to the United States that July, he prepared to go under the knife.
Despite United’s desire for the operation to take place in London, the club acquiesced to Malacia’s wish to return to the Netherlands and agreed to his personal choice of surgeon. Two weeks after the procedure, Malacia travelled back to Manchester to begin his rehabilitation.
But things did not go as planned initially, with inflammation around the affected knee.
When different training methods did not improve things, scans revealed small fragments of cartilage were present around the meniscus and were interfering with the healing process.
Malacia last played for United’s first team in May 2023 (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
Malacia had two options: either leave the fragments be and hope they go away naturally, meaning no significant delay to his return, or open up the knee again and undergo another surgical procedure to hopefully clear up the issue for good.
“We spoke to the guy who did my surgery and then we made the decision: we had to do something else,” he says.
More surgery it was, then, but that came with consequences. “I had to start my rehab over, basically… I had one day to be disappointed and then I had to be like, ‘OK, we go again’.”
When United announced last December that Malacia had suffered the setback and undergone another operation, he was said to be “on course to return to action early next year” — the phrasing intentionally left vague to maximise the window in which he could come back.
But here we are in November, almost a year since his setback, and only now is he ready to play again. Why has it taken so long?
“At the end of the day, we want to do everything right, at the right time,” Malacia says. “We don’t want to rush into things. It is going well, very well, now — step by step. Maybe it went a little bit too quickly before, so we’ve learned from that.”
Taking a patient approach has not always been by design.
As The Athletic reported in April, some sources put Malacia’s delayed return at least partly down to United’s medical department not always having the capacity to give him the level of attention needed. Last season’s injury pile-up, on top of a busy schedule of fixtures, stretched resources.
Malacia acknowledges he required additional care on top of what United could provide but is not critical of the club’s handling of his recovery.
“We had a lot of injuries and my injury needed a lot of attention,” he says. “So with the medical part, at some point we decided, ‘OK, you need some extra people around you to help you, to be there working with you every day to focus only on you’.”
As a result, during the second half of last season, Malacia began travelling back to the Netherlands and to Barcelona in Spain to work with external specialists rather than staying at United’s Carrington training complex. “The club and me, we all decided at that point, ‘OK, you can go do your rehab over there’,” he says.
There were also suggestions that Malacia could have reported the discomfort in his knee sooner and could have been more communicative with the club in the very early stages of his rehabilitation, while he was in the Netherlands after the first surgery. If he could go right back to the start of this process again, would he approach it any differently?
“I think at the end of the day, everything I did, even if it was a mistake or something, I won’t even see it as a mistake because it’s a lesson,” Malacia says. “I think everything in life is already written for me. I had to go through this whole process to be where I’m at now, so I wouldn’t do anything different.”
United allowed Malacia, pictured on international duty in the summer of 2023 before surgery, to do his recovery work away from the club (Jeroen Meuwsen/Orange Pictures)
But more than any single decision or course of action taken by either the player or the club, Malacia’s long road back is down to the complex nature of the injury itself. “That’s why now we took our time,” he says.
Thankfully, the 25-year-old does not expect an almost 18-month lay-off to have a long-term effect on his career, neither physically nor psychologically. “Of course, I’ve had some moments where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m getting tired of this’,” he says. “But there’s no way I could ever give up. It’s not my system, it’s not in our family.”
Malacia’s rehabilitation has also been an intensely private process.
United have released only a handful of updates on his recovery and the player’s social media accounts have stayed dormant since July last year. That left a vacuum where the wider world could speculate on why it was taking so long for him to return from an injury that typically keeps players sidelined for no more than a few months.
As a result, social media was filled with explanations for his prolonged absence, many of them bizarre, almost all of them wildly inaccurate.
There were, predictably, suggestions he had died. Other posts jokingly claimed he had run away with the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, whose whereabouts were also the subject of intense speculation earlier this year as she dealt privately with a cancer diagnosis.
There were also serious claims he had been arrested or entered a witness protection programme.
“No, nothing was true,” he says. “No, no. I’ve just been doing my rehab. Especially when I was in Holland, I was close to my family — so just training, family, sleeping; training, family, sleeping. The only thing I’ve done.” No running off with a princess either, then? “No!”
As ludicrous as some of the rumours were, the nature of such speculation would force many with a public profile to break their silence. Malacia chose not to do that.
“First of all, I’m not really a guy who’s on social media a lot,” he says. “If it wasn’t my cousin or my mum sending me this, I wouldn’t even know. Most of the time, a week after I’d find out they were saying this or that.
“As long as my family and I know I’m good, it’s enough. The most important thing is that I know I’m good.”
Malacia chose not to address the conspiracy theories on social media (Mark Critchley/The Athletic)
Occasionally, the online speculation would creep into Malacia’s offline world. He’d see a friend or acquaintance when out for dinner while back in the Netherlands and they would ask him about the rumours.
“People were saying are you not worried or don’t want to say anything, especially friends around me, because other people were asking them because they couldn’t get through to me,” he says. “They were asking me, ‘Don’t you want to say something publicly about it?’ I was like, ‘No, because I’m not on the internet a lot, I don’t get all this information. If you guys didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t even know. I’m fine’.”
He is speaking now, however, believing it important to set the record straight. Because the reality is that while social media was abuzz with bizarre explanations for his absence, Malacia did have real issues in his personal life that he had to contend with.
“It’s a bit difficult, because I’m not like a guy who talks about these types of things, but my dad got sick,” he says.
Sanroy, Malacia’s father, is described as his “superpower” by one figure close to him. Sanroy travelled by himself to Thailand in the summer of 2022 to watch his son’s first game as a United player on the club’s pre-season tour to the Far East and Australia. A few months later, however, he fell ill. “He wasn’t able to walk anymore,” says Malacia. “For my family, it was a big, big impact. It’s still difficult sometimes.”
There was also a bereavement — his grandmother passed away last December, not long after his injury setback. “For me, she was like my mum; basically, my second mum,” he says. “I lived there for a couple of years. I was there every day, especially when I played in Holland. After every training, I went there. Every time I go back to Holland, the first thing I did was go visit her. Always the first thing.”
Malacia’s grandmother was a widow, his grandfather having passed away six years ago. “She always said it was difficult for her to be alone,” he says. “After I went to Manchester, we weren’t there anymore. That was also difficult for her.
“I think she is at peace now, so that makes me happy as well, because I’ve seen her in pain a couple of weeks before she passed away. I saw her changing as well, as a human being. I’m happy she’s with my grandpa now. They’re up there together and they’re in peace. That’s the most important thing for me, that she has rest.”
Coping with grief and his father’s illness at the same time as his football career stalled proved challenging. Malacia’s approach was to compartmentalise.
“I think in my life, I give it, like, a ‘spot’ somewhere,” he says. “It’s been difficult at times because, especially as a football player, this happens but you still have training tomorrow. You have to deal with this, but you still have to be sharp. Especially in my situation.”
There were times when he contemplated pausing his rehabilitation — “I was like, ‘OK, what if we say to skip all this? I’m not coming for, like, two or three weeks because this happened’,” he recalls — but ultimately he would resolve to keep going.
“I think you have to motivate yourself because if you’re not doing that, the world isn’t going to do it for you,” he says. “If I’m not waking up in the morning… if I’m not working hard enough in the gym, my mum, my dad and my sister can’t do it for me.
“I always thought that I was mentally already strong, but now I know. I’ve been through a lot and even though I’ve been through this, I’ve been smiling every day.”
Approaching every day with positivity has proved a challenge but it’s one Malacia believes he has risen to.
As well as relying on the support of his family, he has found strength in his faith. Prayer, he says, brings him peace and power. “I think the last couple of months I’ve been more consistent and doing this every day. It’s been the first priority in my life now.”
It’s helped keep him motivated. “You can ask the guys at the club — every time I came in, even though I was feeling s***, sometimes they were like, ‘Oh, your energy is so good, you give me energy again… how is he still smiling, or how is he still working after this and this happened to him?’.”
His team-mates have been there for him when needed, too. Malacia is close to Marcus Rashford, who he speaks to on a daily basis. Bruno Fernandes, the captain, would check in with him every so often during his time away from Carrington, as would Mason Mount, who has had his own considerable injury woes since joining United in summer 2023.
Casemiro gave his FA Cup winner’s medal to Malacia (Michael Regan – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
That support network has been strengthened with the reinforcement of United’s Dutch contingent.
Malacia is only five days younger than Matthijs de Ligt and knows him well from their academy days on separate sides of the Ajax-Feyenoord divide. Joshua Zirkzee briefly attended the same school as Malacia — Thorbecke Talentschool, in Rotterdam — and they once played down the same wing together in an under-19s game.
But naturally, there have been times when he has felt isolated from the rest of the squad, like on those occasions when he would finish his rehabilitation work at Carrington early and then sit and watch training from the sidelines, unable to take part. Or, notably, in the celebrations that followed United’s FA Cup final victory in May.
Although Malacia has regularly visited Old Trafford on matchdays during his recovery — “I try to keep it low-key,” he says — that day at Wembley was one of the few occasions where he has been in the public eye since his injury. “Of course, I wanted to be there to support everyone but, for me, the most difficult part was to be up there with the guys (for the trophy presentation), because I wasn’t part of the team during the whole process,” he says.
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Malacia did not want to climb Wembley’s famous steps with his team-mates, but Casemiro insisted. “I was like, ‘I’m staying down here and you guys just enjoy it, then I’ll see you in the dressing room’. He was like, ‘Nah, you have to go up there as well’. And if someone with that kind of experience tells you that, you’re listening.”
Because, despite his own reservations, the rest of the squad wanted him there. “They said, ‘At the end of the day, you’re still part of the team’. I’ve been in a dressing room the whole season and seen everything. They know how hard I’ve been working every day to come back to the team and everything, so they said you deserve it as much as we do.”
Casemiro also gave Malacia his FA Cup winner’s medal — a story which was denied in some quarters at the time but that Malacia himself says is true, despite him politely protesting that the former Real Madrid midfielder should keep it. “Like I said before: if he gives you that, you just listen!”
Malacia joins the United team celebrating the FA Cup win (Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)
Malacia will not be watching on from the peripheries for much longer, though. He has several targets for the remainder of the season. Obviously, the list includes playing a lot of football matches. “Not a specific number,” he says. “It’s just game by game.
“Other than that, I want to bring the team back on top. That’s what the standard has to be at Man United. Even though it’s difficult, you always should aim for the top.”
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He wants to set a good example, especially for his younger sister. “(To show) that everything is possible in life… that even (with) bad things in life, you shouldn’t see it as a bad thing. See it as a lesson and outgrow it.”
And he wants to give something back to United’s fans. “Especially sometimes when I left the club, the people outside waiting there were always positive — especially the kids. They give me a lot of energy, always saying we want to see you back.
“That just makes me happy and gives me my drive every time. I’m not going to disappoint them.”
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
