Barcelona says Marc-Andre ter Stegen is back as captain after medical report is sent to the Spanish league

Barcelona says Marc-Andre ter Stegen is back as captain after medical report is sent to the Spanish league (AP Photo)

Barcelona says Marc-Andre ter Stegen will return as first-team captain after announcing on Friday that the goalkeeper had authorized the club to send his medical report to the Spanish league.

The announcement came after Ter Stegen criticized suggestions he was to blame for Barcelona’s inability to register new players, insisting that his back surgery and recovery timeline were fully approved by the club.

The disagreement led to the 33-year-old Ter Stegen being stripped of the club’s captaincy on Thursday. But that changed Friday.

“The club announces that the player Marc-Andre ter Stegen has signed the authorization necessary for the club to send La Liga the medical report relating to his surgery,” Barcelona said in a statement. “The disciplinary case has been closed and the player is captain of the first team once again with immediate effect.”

The club had opened a disciplinary proceeding against the goalkeeper on Tuesday after discrepancies about the recovery time for the lower back surgery that Ter Stegen successfully underwent last week.

Barcelona needed him to sign the injury report so it could be sent to the Spanish league in order to clear some salary-cap space and allow the club to more easily register other players without breaching financial fair play rules.

Ter Stegen said ahead of the surgery that the recovery time would be about three months. The club did not give an official timetable for the recovery process, saying only that the operation was “successful" and that “his recovery will determine when he can return.”

The club signed Espanyol goalkeeper Joan García in June. Its other goalkeepers are veteran Wojciech Szczęsny and Iñaki Peña.

Ter Stegen missed nearly all of last season because of a ruptured tendon in his knee, and in 2023 he missed about two months because of another back operation. Peña and the 35-year-old Szczęsny started in place of Ter Stegen last season.

Barcelona, the defending Spanish league champion, arrived back in Spain on Tuesday after completing a preseason tour in Asia.