When Newcastle United completed a dramatic deadline day deal to sign Brentford’s Yoane Wissa, no one could have predicted that we wouldn’t see the Congolese forward play for us at all in his first two months at the club.

Jetting off for international duty almost immediately after putting pen to paper, Wissa picked up a knee injury that initially ruled him out until mid October.

However, as was just our luck, the player with an otherwise fantastic injury record would go onto be ruled out for a further month, with the general expectation being that we wouldn’t see Wissa play until mid November at the earliest.

And after some debate and online rumours began to circulate that Wissa could be facing even more time on the sidelines, a new report looks to have set things straight.

Wissa return date as surgery fears are eased

According to The Mail’s Craig Hope, Yoane Wissa has avoided a serious injury and won’t be needing to undergo surgery, although he is more likely to return for our trip to Brentford on November 9th than our visit to West Ham the week prior.

Writing in his Newcastle Confidential column, Hope revealed that Wissa was suffering from a PCL rather than an ACL injury. Still not ideal, but thankfully not an end to his entire 2025 like many had feared.

This means that the 29-year-old is still on track to be ready BEFORE the November international break, having already been running on grass.

The only potential detractor from this news is that Wissa reportedly has major swelling surrounding his knee, which will need to subside before he can make the team sheet any time soon.

Thankfully Nick Woltemade has shown to be more than capable of being our primary goalscoring threat in Wissa’s absence, so we’re only a handful of more games away from seeing the pair finally play together.

AFCON surprise on the cards?

There remains the concern that once Wissa does finally kick a ball under Eddie Howe, he will soon be going back to play for DR Congo as they compete in the African Cup of Nations, which takes place over late December and much of January.

However, Hope reports that Wissa could very well stay for longer than anticipated on Tyneside, as he wants to show his commitment to us after we spent £55m on bringing him up North.

Of course, the priority at the moment is seeing him make a full recovery and start to actually play first, but it’s incredibly commendable for a player of Wissa’s calibre that he would be willing to at least partially miss some of his tournament representing his country in favour of playing for us and finally living out his dream of playing in the Champions League.

DR Congo reached the semi-finals of the previous tournament, and Wissa will be integral if the Leopards want to once again be serious contenders.

It will be up to Wissa’s compatriots alone however if they are to play in next summer’s World Cup, as he is very unlikely to play in the upcoming games to determine who will be CAF’s representative in the inter-confederation play-offs, where DR Congo will play Cameroon, where the winners will play one of Nigeria or Gabon.