Emiliano Martínez: The Injury That Changed His Career

Emiliano Martínez has broken bones before. That comes with the job. But two injuries now define him: one he can hardly remember, and one he chose to remember forever.

The Argentina and Chelsea goalkeeper is still recovering from a brutal collision with Everton’s Jarrad Branthwaite, an impact that left him unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, his head and neck immobilized as Stamford Bridge fell silent. He recalls the foul. After that, almost nothing.

Yet even that broken jaw, which currently has him blending his meals “to the consistency of baby food,” as he put it, is not the wound that changed his career – and his life.

That moment came months earlier, in a different shirt and on a different stage.

The finger that changed everything

On May 20, in Aston Villa’s Europa League final win over Freiburg, Martínez felt something was wrong. The medal was around his neck, the celebrations in full flow, but the pain in his right hand cut through the euphoria. Scans confirmed it: a broken ring finger.

His first thought was not about Villa. It was about Argentina.

“I said, ‘No! I’m not making to the World Cup!’ and started to cry. I was out,” Martínez told Argentine reporter Gaston Edul on his podcast. The fear was immediate and raw: miss the World Cup, lose the shirt, lose the moment.

Then came the message that kept the door open. Lionel Scaloni, Argentina’s manager, sent him a line that Martínez still carries with him: “Whether or not you make it I’m going to back you.”

That backing gave him the courage to make a decision most doctors advised against.

Playing through stars and “blood sausage”

Together with Argentina goalkeeping coach Martín Tocalli and trainer Dani Martínez, Dibu chose the hard road. No surgery. No long layoff. He would play through the pain and try to carry Argentina through the tournament.

The cost was brutal.

Training sessions turned into tests of endurance. Each time he pushed himself up from the turf, he tried to avoid using his right hand. Sometimes, he said, he saw stars. Nights were worse. The pain often kept him awake until midnight, his finger swollen and discolored, “like a blood sausage.”

He had to find a way to protect it and still perform at the level a World Cup demands. Eventually, he did. A specially fitted cast over the damaged finger, combined with a custom glove from Adidas, gave him just enough protection to function. Not to feel comfortable – that was never on offer – but to compete.

It still changed him as a goalkeeper. The injury, he admitted, affected him throughout the tournament. Every catch, every punch, every dive came with calculation and risk.

Yet he did not miss a minute.

Martínez played all eight of Argentina’s matches, from group stage to the final, as they pushed all the way to extra time before falling 1–0 to Spain. Over the course of the tournament he made 20 saves and conceded eight goals, a full campaign on a hand that doctors wanted to open up and repair.

A sliding door to Chelsea

That decision not only kept him in the World Cup. It altered the path of his club career.

An Italian side – widely reported to be Juventus – had lined up a move to sign him from Aston Villa. The finger changed that. Concern over the injury and the potential need for surgery saw that option fade. The door closed in Italy, and another opened in London.

He is now Chelsea’s No. 1, the consequence of a gamble taken months earlier with Argentina’s crest on his chest and a damaged finger hidden under layers of protection.

The irony is sharp. The injury that might have cost him everything instead pushed him toward one of the biggest clubs in Europe.

Pain, perspective, and a promise

Right now, though, the immediate concern is his jaw. The collision with Branthwaite left him knocked out cold, a chilling sight even in a sport hardened to impact. In his conversation with Edul, Martínez said he remembers the foul but very little after it.

He is expected to return sooner than first feared, and he insists the jaw will heal. The finger is different. The operation to fully fix the fourth finger on his right hand still waits. Doctors have warned him that even if he goes under the knife now, it will never be as it would have been had he accepted surgery and missed the World Cup.

He knows the trade-off. He accepts it.

He was asked, essentially, if he would do it again. Put his body through that, risk the long-term damage, live with a finger that will never be the same.

His answer was unequivocal.

“We represented the country as well as possible. At the end, what stays is what you represent to the country,” he said.

After the World Cup final defeat, he did not want to go back to Argentina. The pain of losing on that stage cut too deep. But his child asked him to return. So he went.

What he found surprised him.

“I went back to Argentina, which I didn’t want to. I was really bad. My kid asked me to go back, and I went and felt a lot more love than when we won in Qatar.”

The broken jaw will heal. The crooked finger will not. For Martínez, that seems a fair price for what he now knows: the scars stayed, but so did the love.