Mohammed Kudus faces fresh injury nightmare with Tottenham star at risk of missing World Cup
Tottenham have suffered a huge blow with Kudus set to miss the remainder of the season
Mohammed Kudus is set to undergo surgery after suffering a fresh injury blow during an individual training session this week.
Reports indicate that the Tottenham forward faces a recovery window of roughly three months – a timeline that would end his Premier League season and cast serious doubt over his participation at the 2026 World Cup with Ghana.
The 25-year-old felt something in his hamstring during a session on Monday, with further scans conducted on Tuesday confirming the worst.
The news will hit hard at Spurs, where Kudus has been their most dangerous creative outlet all season despite barely making it past the halfway point of the campaign.
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Kudus blow comes on eve of Tottenham return
Kudus originally went down in Tottenham’s 1-1 draw at home to Sunderland on January 4, coming off after just 19 minutes. The injury was worse than first thought.
Rather than taking the standard surgical route at the time, Kudus travelled to Amsterdam to seek advice from a specialist with connections to Ajax, his former club.
The decision was to manage the problem and protect his body – with the summer’s World Cup in mind.
For close to 100 days, he worked through a painstaking rehabilitation programme. The plan had been to return to action in April, with enough games left to sharpen up before Ghana’s campaign in North America begins in June. He was pictured back in first-team training this week, briefly, as it turned out.
Monday’s individual session brought everything crashing down. Surgery is now the most likely outcome, and with a typical post-operative recovery of around three months, Kudus is almost certainly done for the season and in a desperate race to be anywhere near fitness when the tournament begins.
What It Means for Ghana’s World Cup Ambitions
The timing could not be crueller from a Ghana perspective. The Black Stars parted ways with head coach Otto Addo just weeks ago following defeats to Austria and Germany in the March international window.
Whoever takes charge next will inherit a squad already missing one of its most influential figures.
Kudus is one of Ghana’s biggest individual threat going forward. He is direct, he is explosive, and at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar he finished as the Black Stars’ leading scorer, netting twice as they went out at the group stage.
He is the kind of player capable of changing a game with a single moment, and those are exactly the moments Ghana will need this summer.
Ghana are in Group L alongside England, Croatia and Panama, with their tournament opening against Panama in Toronto on June 17.
They then face England in Boston on June 23, before wrapping up their group campaign against Croatia in Philadelphia on June 27.
The surgery timeline puts Kudus right at the absolute outer limit of any realistic World Cup return. Even in the most optimistic scenario, surgery goes smoothly, rehabilitation is clean, there are no further setbacks, he would be returning from his second significant hamstring issue of the same season.
Whether Ghana would risk playing him at anything less than full fitness in a group of that nature is a question their new coach will have to weigh up if the opportunity arises.
De Zerbi brought down to reality at Spurs
At club level, the blow lands at the worst possible time. Tottenham are in a relegation battle under new head coach Roberto De Zerbi, who inherited a treatment room packed with absentees.
Kudus sits near the top of the club’s attacking charts for the season despite being sidelined since January , third for chances created with 23, joint highest for successful dribbles per 90 minutes, and with more completed dribbles than any other Spurs player despite missing over three months.
De Zerbi will now have to plan his final seven games without the player he was most counting on to inject some quality into a side desperately trying to stay in the top flight. The season is not over, but there is no point in pretending that this is not another major blow to the North London club.