Big Update On Kevin Owens' Injury Status, Availability By WWE WrestleMania 42

WWE fans were left heartbroken on the road to WrestleMania 41 as former WWE Universal Champion Kevin Owens took to the microphone on the April 4 episode of "WWE SmackDown" to announce that he would be stepping away from the ring for an undisclosed amount of time. Owens revealed that he had been dealing with neck problems for some time, and after attempting to fight through the pain in order to get to his scheduled match with Randy Orton at WrestleMania 41, he confirmed that he would need neck surgery, putting his career on hold indefinitely.

Reports came out in the weeks following the announcement that Owens had already had his surgery, but that turned out to be false. However, a new report from Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select has confirmed that on July 18, Owens successfully underwent neck surgery, and is finally on the road to recovery. Sources from within WWE have claimed that the injury and subsequent surgery Owens underwent usually takes at least one full year to recover from, meaning that it is very likely that Owens will end up missing WrestleMania 42 in April 2026. However, each person's recovery process is different, and that the company will simply monitor what he is comfortable doing come the turn of the new year.

In the weeks leading up to the announcement, Owens appeared on Cody Rhodes' "What Do You Wanna Talk About?" podcast to explain that, while he wasn't in any real pain anymore, making everything more frustrating as he felt like he could get back in the ring. However, his spinal cord was in such a bad way that there's no way he could get cleared, and that his spinal cord needed to naturally heal before he went in for surgery in order to make the recovery process go a lot smoother.