ONLY IN AMNEWYORK
New York Red Bulls forward Lewis Morgan never allowed himself to think of an uncertain future after suffering a severe tear of the psoas muscle in his left hip during the opening game of the 2023 MLS season.
The mental battle was not one that any athlete could win. The injury was so severe that after he would take the prescribed time off to rest and let it heal, it would immediately re-tear upon his first strides in training.
Doctors were befuddled. They had not seen an injury like this to this muscle, which is located on either side of the vertebral column — one of the most significant muscles within that location.
“I reinjured myself four or five times in the 2023 season,” Morgan revealed to amNewYork. “And because the injury was so severe and sort of unheard of in football, with a grade 3c psoas tear, that happened a couple of times. I would do all the rehab, and I would do the 8 to 10 weeks or whatever, and then I would get back to training, and then bang, it would just happen again.”
Multiple comeback attempts crashed before even getting off the ground, limiting the Scottish playmaker to just five games after a breakout 2022 campaign in which he led the Red Bulls with 14 MLS goals and 18 in all competitions.
Toward the end of last season, surgery was the only option, and doctors told him that he had an 80% chance to return to play, but only a 25% chance that he could return to the performance level that made him one of the league’s top scorers.
“Once I’d done [the surgery], I guess it was just a little bit like, cross your fingers, do everything I can as a player, and let’s see if we can get back,” Morgan said.
Along the path of recovery came the whispers of doubts from outside his camp.
Since when did he become injury-prone? Where will the Red Bulls’ goals come from in 2024, even with Morgan back in the lineup?
“Sometimes you can take things personal and flip it into a positive,” Morgan began. “People always say don’t get hung up on people’s opinions. But I’m maybe someone who has a little bit of a chip on my shoulder who wants to prove people wrong. I knew that in the background, people would be labeling me as injury-prone. But I never missed a game. I’d never missed a training session in probably five or six years. You’d never see me in the physio room… So when people were saying ‘you’re injury prone,’ I would be like, well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. If only you knew what was going on, if only any of us knew, because it was so unknown what was happening to me.
“Football is an industry that moves very, very quick. I knew I’d had a really good year in 2022 and then I would have this thing in the back of my mind that people were always asking about who was going to score goals for this Red Bull team. Who is going to do this? People forget really quick that I was a year removed from being one of the top goal-scorers in the league. So I had that chip on my shoulder and the driving factor was always about getting back and proving all those people wrong and proving myself right, as well.”
Not only did Morgan get back, but he has excelled once more.
The 28-year-old scored 13 goals with seven assists in 29 MLS matches this season. His play was so impressive that in the summer, he was called up to the Scottish national team for the famed European Championships (Euro 2024) — his first time appearing in a match with the Tartan Army since 2018.
As a key cog in the Red Bulls’ machine that fostered a monstrous first-round playoff upset of the defending league champion Columbus Crew, Morgan’s accolades earned him the 2024 MLS Comeback Player of the Year Award, which was announced by the league on Wednesday morning.
Consider it a piece of silverware that has encompassed the numerous times throughout his decade-plus-long career that Morgan has been knocked to the canvas but has found a way to rebound. Once a rising star in his home country, Morgan was cut at 16 years old by Rangers — one of Scotland’s most famed clubs. He worked his way back up to the ranks of Celtic, the second of the Scottish giants, but was loaned to English side Sunderland and then sold to Inter Miami.
After two seasons with David Beckham’s club, he was traded to the Red Bulls.
“It’s probably something I’ll maybe look back on when I’m done playing and be like, ‘Oh, that was a good achievement for myself to prove that you can overcome adversity,'” Morgan said of the award. “I feel like throughout my career, it’s been that type of story where… I feel like I’ve bounced back quite a lot in my career. So I never really questioned that about me, but you always learn different things about yourself.
“Obviously, I never really dealt with an injury like that, so it’s cool that I’ll look back and go, ‘Oh well, I don’t really think there’ll be many more things in my life that will be tougher to overcome than all the mental stuff I went through with my hips.’ So it would just be a good thing to remind myself about what’s possible when you work hard.”
With this award comes the confirmation of a new mindset of sorts. After 10 years of grinding to find consistent success in a notable top-flight league, things about the game became mundane.
A legitimate threat to his career and the unknown that came with it has provided an avalanche of gratitude, of sorts, and a rekindling of love for the game he has committed his life to.
“I think football and my health is probably something I took for granted,” Morgan said. “I would never really sit and say how much I loved football. That would never really be something I would speak about, or would never even really think like that. It had probably got to a point where, because I took my health for granted so much, and I was never injured, that it was turning from being something I love and it was becoming a little bit like it was my job, and I didn’t really get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It was more, this is just who I am. This is what I do. I play football.
“But then when you get an injury and all of that gets taken away from you, now I start to appreciate the day-to-day. I’ve got a much better outlook in terms of every single day I have on the pitch is a blessing. I’m also 28 years old now, so it probably couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve found a new gratitude of what it’s like to actually be playing and be healthy and not trying to take anything for granted.”
