It has been a while since I wrote about a celebrity fighting hair loss. And it is hard to believe that I have never written a post about 43-year-old retired US soccer legend and ex-captain Landon Donovan. Perhaps the most famous soccer player in US history.
Mr. Donovan has been fighting hair loss since the age of 18 when his hairline started receding rapidly. For almost his entire career, Mr. Donovan’s balding was as much the center of attention as were his soccer skills.
Landon Donovan: From Failed Hair Transplants to a Decent Hair System
In spite of getting several hair transplants, Landon Donovan has lost most of his transplanted hair as can be seen in the above image. He supposedly got one transplant to his frontal scalp region, and another to his crown region. The “permanent” donor hair in hair transplants that comes from the back of one’s scalp is not necessarily always permanent. There is no shortage of older people who have absolutely no hair left on their scalps, including in the so-called “permanent” zone.
Nevertheless, Mr. Donovan’s failed hair transplants seem especially egregious. Especially when considering that he got at least one of his hair transplants in 2024 (see bottom part of this post). How could there be no results in 2025? Did he just get unlucky and pick a terrible surgeon? Or was he wrongly advised to get very small procedures of 500 grafts? British soccer legend Wayne Rooney also had subpar results from his first hair transplant. But his second hair transplant seems to have lasted much longer.
In 2025, at the age of 43, Mr. Donovan started wearing a hair system to cover his barren scalp. It looks excellent in my opinion. Moreover, in December 2025, he teamed up with Absci (an artificial intelligence drug and biologic creation company) to help bring forth a cutting edge treatment for hair loss. This is the first ever instance of a hair loss celebrity partnering with a cutting edge biotech company that has a legitimate shot at bringing forth a hair loss treatment or even cure. Many celebrities have partnered with hair restorations clinics in the past after getting great hair transplant results.
Check out Mr. Donovan’s latest video interview from this week on Absci’s YouTube channel (Edit: No longer available).
“For me its not vanity. It’s a disease and its something that we should be able to cure.” — Landon Donovan
In 2024, Mr. Donovan was widely mocked after a TV appearance in which his hair and scalp got all the attention. He later explained that this was due to his getting a hair transplant two weeks earlier and being re-assured that it would not show up on camera. This man has gone through it all when it comes to hair loss. And he is not keen to “just shave it off”, mirroring the preference of all the regular readers of this blog.
Landon Donovan is one of the very few celebrities or athletes that I now follow on X, and I doubt that I will ever unfollow him. He wants a hair loss cure, and is not at all satisfied with hair transplants, hair systems or head shaving for the long run.
