Columbus' Sauro will miss next season due to knee surgeries

It will be a long time before Gaston Sauro returns to the pitch.

In conversation with The Columbus Dispatch's Tom Reed, Gregg Berhalter, the Columbus Crew's manager, revealed Sauro will miss the entirety of the 2017 Major League Soccer season because of multiple knee surgeries. He will go under the knife once again in the coming weeks.

"It's going to be a number of surgeries he's going to get and he's going to be out for the year," Berhalter said. "That's our reality. It's a tough reality, but that's the way it is."

Sauro, an Argentinian centre-back, joined Columbus in 2015 and was acquired as a Discovery Signing using Targeted Allocation Money. He holds only 21 MLS appearances to his name because of injuries, which include a concussion he picked up in his league debut and a hamstring ailment suffered in May.

According to Reed, the injury update casts doubt on Sauro's long-term future with the Crew, which are looking for salary-cap relief on the defender's contract and which left the 26-year-old unprotected for the 2016 MLS Expansion Draft. Based on numbers published by the MLS Players Union, he was the second-highest-paid player on Columbus' squad last season, earning $585,000.