David Raya has revealed that he needs surgery on his nose to be able to breathe properly, but he’s unlikely to get it done until after his playing career ends.
David Raya is widely considered one of the best goalkeepers in the world at the moment, impressing with Arsenal and winning the last three Premier League Golden Glove awards.
Yet the shot-stopped has now revealed that he’s been playing through a breathing issue, with one of his nostrils unable to properly take in air ever since he broke his nose in 2018.
“I break my nose, I get the stitches, and they tell me I cannot get surgery, it’s too inflamed,” Raya said. “So I said ‘okay, I’ll wait until the end of the season’.
“That summer, I moved to Brentford, [and] because I moved, Blackburn didn’t want to pay for the surgery. I said ‘okay, I wait for the next summer’. Covid. ‘Okay, I wait for the next summer’. Promotion. ‘Okay I wait for the next summer’. National team. Every summer I have something.
“So I just decided to wait until I finished my career. It’s not the looks, it’s the functional surgery that I need to have. This [nostril] is okay, but this one, I cannot breathe properly.”
Raya went on to reveal that he’s had a lot of social media criticism over the perception that he’d already had a ‘nose job’, but the reality was that he’d just broken his nose.
Fortunately, the breathing problem doesn’t seem to have held the 31-year-old goalkeeper back.
As mentioned, the injury happened during his time at Blackburn Rovers, and he’s since gone on to move to Brentford, achieve promotion to the Premier League, play for Arsenal, and ultimately win the league with Arsenal.
The Gunners won’t want to spend any serious period of time without their star goalkeeper, so if he is going to get the surgery before he retires, it would ideally need to be at the start of a summer without any international football.
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