McTominay needs a heart procedure, and Napoli lose Serie A’s player of the season for a month
Napoli say the Scotland midfielder has a mild benign arrhythmia and will be back after the international break. He misses the Inter game, the Arsenal tie and Scotland’s first two Nations League matches.
Sep 2, 2026
Scott McTominay came off in the second half at the Maradona on Sunday, and at the time it looked like a manager rearranging a game he was losing. Napoli were beaten 1-2 by Como. Two days later the club explained what it actually was.
McTominay has what Napoli described as a mild, benign arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat, and he will have a procedure called pulsed field ablation to correct it. Napoli say he will be available again after the international break. Reuters put the absence at around a month.
The club were careful about the wording, and that matters
Every word in that statement was chosen. Benign. Mild. Non-serious. Pulsed field ablation is a keyhole procedure, done routinely, and the recovery is measured in weeks rather than seasons. Nobody is talking about a career here.
Still, it is a heart. Italy has screened its competitive athletes harder than almost anyone since 1982, when a nationwide programme made a 12-lead ECG compulsory for everyone aged 12 and over playing organised sport. That system exists to find exactly this sort of thing early, and the sudden-cardiac-death rate among young Italian athletes fell sharply in the decades after it came in. McTominay having a procedure booked in the first week of September, rather than discovering the problem some other way in March, is the screening doing its job.
Napoli lose the player who won them the league
McTominay joined from Manchester United in the summer of 2024 for around 30 million euros, which by now reads as one of the more lopsided fees of the decade. He scored 12 league goals in his first season, was voted Serie A’s player of the season, and scored in the 2-0 win over Cagliari on the final day that sealed the Scudetto by a single point from Inter.
Antonio Conte, who managed that side, has gone. Massimiliano Allegri took over for this season, and McTominay had started both league games under him. Napoli won 2-0 at Genoa on the opening weekend through Kevin De Bruyne and Antonio Vergara, then lost at home to Como. Three points from six, and now their most productive midfielder is out.
The fixtures do not wait. Napoli go to Inter on 5 September, then host Arsenal in the Champions League on 9 September. Allegri has a squad deep enough to cover a month. He does not have anyone else who arrives late in the box the way McTominay does, which is a strange and specific thing to lose.
Scotland lose him for a new manager’s first two games
The timing is worse for Scotland. Sebastien Pocognoli replaced Steve Clarke after the group-stage exit at the World Cup, and his first competitive matches are Scotland’s Nations League openers: away to Slovenia on Saturday 26 September, then Switzerland at Hampden three days later. Group B1 also contains North Macedonia.
McTominay has 15 goals in more than 70 appearances for Scotland, most of them the kind that decide qualifiers rather than pad a total. The overhead kick against Denmark is the one everyone reaches for. A new coach picking his first squad without the player his predecessor built the attack around is not the start Pocognoli would have drawn up.
He should be back for the October window. The word from Naples is that this is a fix, not a diagnosis to live with.