Wolves are currently in the thick of their pre-season training camp – and an update has been offered on Enso Gonzalez.
It has been a productive trip so far with the Wolves players boosting their fitness levels in the blazing Portuguese heat.
Wolves had their first training match on Tuesday against Santa Clara, and by several accounts the team played well despite losing 2-1.
Vitor Pereira fielded two different sides, with Alfie Pond the only man to play both halves.
One man who did not feature for Wolves though was Enso Gonzalez, who is a player fans have barely seen since he signed from Libertad in the summer of 2023.
On the latest E&S podcast, journalist Liam Keen gave an update on the Paraguayan youngster.
Enso Gonzalez stepping up return from injury for Wolves as loan exit suggested
Last year, while playing for Paraguay at the Olympic Games, Gonzalez ruptured his ACL.
It was a huge blow for the youngster, who had struggled a bit in his first season at Wolves.
Gary O’Neil brought Gonzalez to Wolves, but did not hand him his debut until the very end of the 2023/24 season in a 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace.
Up to that point, he had regularly missed out on matchday squads, seemingly as he wasn’t quite ready.
Wolves had intended to send Gonzalez out on loan last summer, but then he got injured.
It was a cruel setback for Gonzalez, but he’s now with the squad out in Portugal on the training camp – and Liam Keen has shared a small update on how he is progressing.
He said: “He wasn’t training properly the other day when we saw (him), but obviously he had been rehabbing from his injury.
“We did report actually, this was during the season, towards the backend, he did have a setback in his comeback from that as well.
“So there’s been a couple of things going on with him but it’s the usual, it’s normal, some players have setbacks, some players will take longer to get back from certain injuries – it was a bad injury as well.
“Hopefully he’ll be back and firing soon, we’ve said this on a podcast before that there’s a good chance that he would be a player who could go on loan as well.
“Depending on how he gets on over the next few weeks, he may get himself some minutes elsewhere.”
Interestingly, this suggestion is at odds with a recent report which claimed Gonzalez was set to stay at Wolves.
Enso Gonzalez needs a productive loan spell away from Wolves
From the sounds of it, Gonzalez is not quite as far on with his recovery to full fitness as Yerson Mosquera and Sasa Kalajdzic.
It remains to be seen if he will have some involvement for Wolves in any of the games that are lined up for pre-season.
At this moment in time though, it feels like a loan move could be on the cards for the 20-year-old.
That injury blow he suffered with Paraguay was extremely unfortunate, and it essentially robbed him of a year of his career.
He now has to try and make up for lost time, and he would surely be best placed to do that away from Wolves, given how strong the competition is for minutes right now.
And we know that Wolves are working on deals to get new players through the door, so things could be even more tricky for Gonzalez if he did stick around.
2025/26 should be about him getting as many minutes into his legs as possible, before hopefully returning to Molineux in 2026 to fight for a first-team spot.