At the age of 30, AbouDiaby is a veteran performer who has made over 130 appearances in the entirety of his playing careerbut this amount of matches played is relatively small for a player that has reached the 30 year old mark.
The main reason of why Diaby has not been able to make a significant higher amount of appearances is due to the consistent amount of injuries that the Frenchman has struggled with which began with Arsenal when he received a career ending tackle on May of 2006.
When AbouDiaby was 19 years old, he was making his debut season as a player of Arsenal and during a match against Sunderland, the former Sunderland defender Dan Smith tackled Diaby so intense that the French player had to undergo 3 surgeries which took around 8 months for him to recover.
Even after the Frenchman was able to fully recover from this injury and heal from the surgery, it appeared like Dan Smith’s injury permanently affected AbouDiaby as he has consistently been consistently picking up further injuries for the rest of his career.
Diaby has recently gone out to talk about his stream of injuries and how it has affected not only his playing career but also his personal life as he has even been nicknamed as: ‘’Glass Man’’
‘’Of course it is the moment that killed everything. That’s where it all came from. It gave me a big restriction on my ankle and I overcompensated with other parts of my body. Before that, I’d never had a muscular injury; my lifestyle was good but really, there is no resentment any more. I left it behind a long time ago’’
“They say I’m ‘L’Homme de Verre’. It means that I’m made of glass. It can be painful, on a psychological level. They don’t know how much I give every day of my life to try and recover. But hey, what can I do? This is my life story.”AbouDiaby said.