Martinez played the World Cup with a broken finger

Martinez says the fracture was there before the Europa League final, though it's not clear from his account whether that's days or weeks before the tournament kicked off. Either way, the Aston Villa goalkeeper chose to play through it rather than go under the knife, and he's now confirmed the finger will never go back to how it was.

For a goalkeeper, hands aren't a detail. They're the job. Grip strength, finger flexibility and the ability to absorb impact at full stretch are the difference between a save and a goal, and Martinez spent the biggest tournament of his career doing all of that with a broken bone he'd decided not to fix.

Why he played on

Martinez hasn't laid out a full medical timeline, but the calculation is obvious enough: surgery before or during a World Cup means recovery time, and recovery time means missing it. For a goalkeeper of his profile, that trade-off was apparently never close. He played, the injury stayed unrepaired, and according to his own account to The Athletic, it's not coming back to normal.

That's the part that turns this from a gritty-keeper anecdote into something sharper. Plenty of players strap up and play through knocks. Fewer come out the other side and say, on record, that the price was permanent.

The welfare question nobody loves asking

Elite football doesn't really have a neutral space where a player can say "I need surgery, I'll miss the tournament" without it being read as letting the team down. Martinez's situation is a clean example of why that pressure matters: a World Cup-winning-calibre goalkeeper weighing up a four-week event against a hand that, by his own admission, won't fully heal.

Nobody at Aston Villa or with Argentina has suggested the injury affects his current performances, and Martinez hasn't framed it that way either. But the story isn't really about whether he can still save a penalty. It's about a sport that keeps asking its best players to make that bet, and keeps getting the same answer.