Written by Jeff Carlisle at ESPN.com
Seattle Sounders forward Clint Dempsey will sit out the rest of the 2016 season because of an irregular heartbeat, the MLS club announced on Tuesday.
Dempsey, 33, was initially sidelined by the symptoms last month but returned to light training on Sept. 14. Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey said at the time that he was “cautiously optimistic” that the U.S. international would return by the end of the campaign, though he declined then to give any kind of timetable.
But Dempsey stopped training last week, leading to Tuesday’s announcement.
“We simply haven’t got to a point where we were comfortable that there was a realistic chance” of Dempsey returning this year, Lagerwey told reporters. “As we said in the first round of comments, we are not comfortable putting any kind of pressure on this.
“His return to play is not important relative to his health, both short- and long-term. We feel by ruling him out today it puts us in the best position to get him back, hopefully for the start of the 2017 season.”
Lagerwey added that no further updates are likely to come until training camp next season, though he did shed a bit more light on the process Dempsey has gone through over the last month.
“Dempsey had been getting some tests over the course of a couple of months,” he said. “We got some data that showed an irregularity. We then took him out and proceeded to begin this evaluation. That process is still underway.”
“It was something that we had found over the course of him playing for us, and we had been tracking him and monitoring him over time and it popped up. It’s something we have to take care of and we can’t take any risks with something as serious as this.
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