For Tyler Adams' injury saga to end, Bournemouth, USMNT and the player must work together (2024)

Tyler Adams must have felt that familiar sinking sensation. Another pre-season ruined, another start to a Premier League campaign on the sidelines staring him in the face.

If the midfielder thought he’d finally put his injury woes behind him by starting each of the USMNT’s three games at Copa America last month, fate was lining up a nasty surprise.

As his Bournemouth team-mates ran out at Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles on Wednesday for a high-profile pre-season friendly against fellow Premier League side Arsenal, the 25-year-old was a spectator.

Adams is in LA with the Bournemouth squad, having headed there to work with their medical staff as he recuperates from the back surgery he underwent in nearby Marina del Rey on July 4. That operation is the reason he will miss the start of Bournemouth’s season for the second year in a row.

He missed a lot more than just the beginning of the first one, to be truthful. A return of the hamstring problems that had affected him in his 2022-23 season with Leeds United caused Adams to miss all but three of his new club’s 38 top-flight games. Of the three he did play in, he started just one.

So he has had plenty of experience when it comes to, as he did again at the home of MLS side LA Galaxy a few days ago, watching his team from the dugout.

During the Arsenal game, Bournemouth wore a special-edition kit designed by Black Panther actor Michael B Jordan, who owns a stake in the club. Jordan’s involvement is part of a strategy by majority owner Bill Foley, who also owns top-flight U.S. ice hockey team Vegas Golden Knights, to grow Bournemouth’s profile in North America.

Foley’s plan is also one of the reasons they signed USMNT international Adams, for a fee in the region of £23million ($29.6m at the current exchange rate) plus potential add-ons, last summer. So far, he has had more impact as a promotional tool than on the pitch.

There is at least some good news. Bournemouth do not believe this setback is a major one and hope to have Adams available in September or October. Such is their faith in his return early in the coming season, they are not trying to strengthen at his No 6 position before the summer transfer window closes at the end of next month.

Senior figures at Bournemouth have fingers crossed that Adams’ latest round of surgery could be the solution to his persistent injury problems. They will certainly hope it was a more effective procedure than the one he underwent on his hamstring while at Leeds.

That required a second operation last year which necessitated the long lay-off but eventually fixed the issue, and Adams’ most recent surgery — a minimally invasive procedure on his back — was not connected.

The midfielder had been periodically dealing with painful back spasms, and wanted to take the chance to ensure he can be pain-free going into the new season even if it meant he missed the start of it.

“He has been very unlucky in terms of injuries,” Foley told UK broadcaster the BBC in California last week. “He had a poor operation early on, on a hamstring injury, and he has a back problem.

“We believe that has been resolved with this last situation two or three weeks ago. We know the doctor he went to. He is one of the best back surgeons in America.

“I believe Tyler is fixed. It will be three months — 90 days — before he is playing with us, but once he starts playing, he is a phenomenal player. He is a leader on the field, a no-nonsense guy. He wants to win. That is the most important thing: his desire to win.”

Given all of his struggles to stay fit for the past year and more, Adams will have been made aware of the need for a cautious approach at the Copa America.

Doubling as guest participants in and hosts of the South American championship’s 2024 instalment, the United States men’s team viewed the tournament as a vital test.

The U.S. had qualified for one of the six guest slots given to CONCACAF (North and Central America, and the Caribbean) nations to make up a 16-team competition, giving them a rare opportunity to play high-level competitive matches before co-hosting the 2026 men’s World Cup with Canada and Mexico. As they will therefore not need to navigate CONCACAF’s qualification rounds to be part of the expanded 48-team field for that tournament, this Copa America carried outsized importance not just for the team but for the sport in the United States.

Adams, of course, entered the group phase with questions around his fitness, having made one 10-minute appearance for Bournemouth since the end of March before coming off the bench late in a pre-tournament warm-up game against Brazil.

Throughout his career, he has maintained a fierce passion for representing his country whenever possible. His first international goal was a decisive one against big regional rival Mexico. He took pride in captaining a young U.S. team at the 2022 World Cup, earning praise for his defensive work in a midfield trio with Yunus Musah and Weston McKennie.

His lack of availability during the 2023-24 season coincided with the emergence of another young American defensive midfielder: Johnny Cardoso, a New Jersey-born, Brazil-raised 22-year-old who dazzled upon arriving at Spain’s Real Betis from Brazilian club Internacional this January. For the first time, Adams had a true challenger to anchor the U.S. midfield — especially if he was offering anything less than his omnipresent best.

It was a relief to many, then, when Gregg Berhalter included Adams in his starting line-up for the group-stage opener against Bolivia. He looked like his usual self that night in Dallas: tidy in possession, positionally responsible in all phases, and eager to snuff out Bolivian attacks whenever they materialized. With his team leading 2-0 at half-time, Berhalter opted to keep Adams fresh for the matches ahead and replaced him with Musah.

It is a measure of his relentless desire to be on the pitch that, in the post-match mixed zone afterwards, Adams could not hide his frustration about getting the half-time hook.

“That was the plan,” Adams said, “but he (Berhalter) changed the plan. He’s the coach. He said, ‘We’ll check in at half-time and see how you feel.’ I told him that I felt fine. He still took me out, so that’s his plan.”

Ultimately, the Bolivia match would prove to be the only favourable one of the USMNT’s brief involvement in the tournament.

Adams started again three days later against Panama in Atlanta, but a shock Tim Weah red card after 18 minutes forced Berhalter to again pull the Bournemouth man at half-time — this time as a tactical change with his team playing down a man.

In the pivotal group finale against Uruguay in Kansas City, Adams played every minute. Naturally, this was a very different type of game than the opener, as the USMNT squared up against one of the eventual semi-finalists. Whereas the USMNT dominated Bolivia and Adams got on the ball 42 times in one half, he logged just 45 touches in a full-90 shift against Uruguay.

As his team fell 1-0 behind and ended up eliminated, Adams and his team-mates watched on as Canada and Panama got to represent CONCACAF in the knockout rounds.

One has to be careful when assessing a player’s performance in a major tournament. The sample sizes are inevitably slight, especially when a team fail to advance from their group. The USMNT’s Copa America data will also be skewed after playing exactly 20 per cent of their tournament at a disadvantage, following Weah’s dismissal.

With that said, there are a couple of troubling findings when comparing Adams’ 180 minutes of Copa action and the 360 minutes he logged at the World Cup 18 months earlier.

Again, we can only glean so much from such a meagre sample. With that stressed, there is some evidence Adams wasn’t able to be as impactful at the base of midfield as he was at Qatar 2022. Although he won a slightly higher share of duels in the air, he was less effective when the ball was on the ground. He was also far less effective when he attempted a tackle, both in terms of winning those challenges and avoiding committing fouls. Then again, every CONCACAF team had a bone to pick about how fouls were called at the Copa America.

Game-state did Adams few favours as the United States were forced to backpedal or bunker in far more often than they could dictate the flow of a match. One would think that’s exactly when they would need Adams at his best — and, with the benefit of hindsight, we know for sure that he was anything but operating at 100 per cent.

For his part, Berhalter spoke repeatedly of trying to use Adams responsibly, alluding to not putting strain on players that might impact their fitness for their clubs. But after the news of his surgery emerged, Bournemouth head coach Andoni Iraola said Adams had been in “pain” before representing his country this summer.

“He wanted to play Copa America because it was very important for him, but he had restrictions and was still in pain, so two days after they were knocked out, he had surgery,” Iraola said. “He is out for some time. It is difficult to say how long but he won’t be fit for the start of the season. September? October? I don’t know.”

Speaking of why Bournemouth did not block Adams from going on international duty, Iraola said: “It was not our choice. It is a decision for the nations, who are allowed to select players, and he wanted to play, thinking the injury would get better. But he felt it was getting worse.”

Fortunately for Adams, the man who pays both him and Iraola sounded philosophical about one of his star assets making the same number of appearances for his country in nine days as he did for Bournemouth during the whole of the 10-month club season.

“I think every young athlete wants to play for their country,” Foley said. “I appreciate that. We want him to play for Bournemouth — and he will.”

Patience is a virtue, and now everyone connected with the player hopes Foley’s understanding is rewarded with a season that sees him become his old self once more.

With player, club and country in lockstep, the last 18 months of frustration can become a footnote in his journey to take the Premier League by storm and hit his peak at the World Cup.

(Top photo: Robin Alam/ISI Photos/Getty Images)