Dejan Kulusevski is back in a Sweden shirt for the first time in more than two years.
In an interview with Fotbollskanalen from the national-team camp, the Tottenham winger described the summer decision that made the comeback possible: a full knee transplant, laid out by doctors with roughly even odds of ever playing football again.
He turned it down.
“No one has ever come back from it, it’s 50/50,” the 26-year-old told Fotbollskanalen about the procedure, which would have cost him another 18 months on top of an absence that already ran past 500 days.
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His answer, he said, was simpler: if the knee still hurt when he played, he would play through the pain.
Two surgeries, and a transplant on the table
Kulusevski injured his right kneecap on 11 May 2025, forced off after 19 minutes of Tottenham’s Premier League fixture at Crystal Palace. Two operations followed, and neither of them fixed the problem. By the summer of 2026 the medical consensus he was hearing had shifted towards the most drastic option on the table: replacing his kneecap with someone else’s.
A specialist in Serbia and a call from Perisic
He said no, and then went looking for another plan. The route out ran through a specialist in Serbia, with a phone call from Ivan Perisic and the backing of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The Serbian doctor, Kulusevski said, told him there would be no more operations and gave him a rehabilitation protocol he could believe in.
When Kulusevski finally made his return on 19 October, coming on in the 87th minute of Tottenham’s 3-1 win over Coventry City, Ibrahimovic sent a single-word text message: “Bravo.”
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Disappointment inside the building
The 526 days left a mark beyond the knee. Kulusevski told Fotbollskanalen that plenty of people around him had been skeptical he would come back at all, and that some of that doubt had come from inside Tottenham itself.
“I’ve been disappointed in people during this period, but at the same time I have to forgive everything,” he said.
He is now in Sweden’s squad for the November international window, three weeks after his first appearance for Tottenham since May 2025.
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