Pezzella, close to a River return: «I was in a dark place» | OneFootball

The center back is in the final stage of recovery after the ligament tear he suffered in August 2025, and he spoke about how he was feeling before that match against Independiente: “Personally, I wasn’t going through a good time,” he said.

On the verge of playing again after more than seven months out due to a ligament tear, Germán Pezzella spoke about the path he had to go through from that injury against Independiente to the present day, which finds him in a different place. “In the last year before the injury, I wasn’t going through a good time, and everything has consequences,” the defender admitted.

“When you’re on that kind of strange, kind of dark path that you keep going down, in the end something gets sent your way to get your attention and say, ‘You need to stop,’” he said in an interview with journalist Sofía Martínez. He added: “Starting from scratch and trying, from wherever you can, to grab onto a little thread and pull yourself back to who you were.”

Without explicitly talking about mental health, Pezzella himself admitted that he was having a hard time and struggling to enjoy his present, which had him at the club he loves after winning the World Cup and still being part of the Argentina national team squad.

“It’s very difficult because a lot of the people you talk to give you the easy answer: ‘You’ve just become world champion. You live in Spain.’ I was lucky that, before returning, I was at a club where they gave me everything, and I had to tell them that I wanted to leave,” he said, and then admitted that at Núñez he had not managed to find the happiness he had come looking for.

“When I came to River, I realized that I wasn’t really enjoying it. The work was much more personal, introspective. It was a lot, and it overwhelmed me. It was a great lesson for me because, in the whirlwind we live in, we often isolate ourselves because of the level of exposure, and you start to lose sight a little of the people who are really by your side and stop paying attention to things that slip away from you,” he said.

Just days away from his return to professional football (Coudet already considers him fully available and could include him in the squad for one of the next matches), Pezzella seems to have turned the page. Calmer and more focused, the 34-year-old defender concluded:

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.