Omar Elabdellaoui completes miracle return to football after firework incident

Galatasaray defender Omar Elabdellaoui completed a miraculous return to football on Monday, 14 months after his career appeared to be over when a firework exploded in his face.

Elabdellaoui, 30, was left clinically blind following the incident, which happened on New Year’s Eve in 2020.

The Norway international’s right eye was left severely damaged and there were fears that he’d never regain his sight, let alone return to professional football.

“I just thought I had something in my eye and had to clear it out but then I felt my face totally burning and everything was black,” Elabdellaoui said in a recent interview with The Guardian.

“I tried desperately to understand but it was difficult. Because of all the gunpowder my face was burned. I think it was difficult for them to say how bad it was straight away. In one moment I grabbed the doctor to say: ‘Just tell me the truth, tell me how bad it is.’ She said: ‘Your left eye doesn’t look too bad but your right eye, we do not know.’ But the way she said it, I knew it was not good.”

He continued: “I didn’t really have control over the first days. Everything was dark – I didn’t know if it was night or day. Time was irrelevant.

“There were a lot of people and noise. Voices become so much louder as you hear everything when you can’t see. The longer it took, the more afraid I was.

“I didn’t dare to sleep. As soon as I got a bit of light after a few days in my left eye, I was afraid to sleep as I was afraid of the darkness, so was afraid to close my eyes. Even though it was a tiny bit of light from my left, I was always checking if the light was there because I was afraid of losing it.”

In February 2021, a doctor at the Cincinnati Eye Institute gave Elabdellaoui a 5-10% chance of