Two men — one running, the other riding an electric bicycle — proceed along a trail in the middle of a densely wooded park.

It is a grey, chilly morning in October and both have wrapped themselves up against the cold. The man running is wearing a red tracksuit top and slim-fitting navy-blue tracksuit bottoms, along with a lightweight black beanie, neck-warmer and gloves. He is tall and slender, with a thick black beard, and his angular features are fixed in concentration.

The two men are alone on the trail, the only sounds the runner’s breathing, the pounding of his feet on the path, the whir of the bike’s wheels and occasional snatches of birdsong. The trees flash past them on either side as they go.

Emerging from the forest, the pair skirt a narrow lake and come across a family, out for a stroll, who shout words of encouragement as they pass. After another couple of kilometres along the trail, which winds its way in and out of the trees, they come to a halt.

Breathing hard, the runner puts his hands on his hips and gives himself a moment to recover from the effort, but he has a broad smile across his face. And with good reason. His name is Nabil Bentaleb and four months earlier, he came very close to losing his life.

A defensive midfielder with French club Lille, Bentaleb collapsed after suffering a cardiac arrest while playing football with friends during the summer off-season and had to be rushed to hospital, where he was placed in a coma.

Since coming out of the coma two days later and being fitted with a defibrillator, he has been patiently and painstakingly trying to resurrect his footballing career. The early days are a blur of physical discomfort, anxiety, doubt and questioning. But bit by bit, day by day, week by week, his recovery slowly progresses.

On that October morning, he ran outside for the first time since his collapse. Four months later, he made an extraordinary footballing comeback, rising from the substitutes’ bench in a league match against Rennes and scoring a goal that made headlines around the world.

This is how he did it.

Bentaleb’s transfer to Lille from Angers in August 2023 was a homecoming in the truest sense.

Born to Algerian parents in the northern French city in November 1994, he grew up in the bustling and ethnically diverse Wazemmes neighbourhood and spent five years on Lille’s books between the ages of nine and 14.

Released by Lille in 2009, he spent time in the youth setups at Belgian side Excelsior Mouscron and French club Dunkerque before making his professional breakthrough in the Premier League with Tottenham Hotspur at 19. After three seasons in Spurs’ first-team squad and a five-year stint with Schalke in Germany, which included a short loan spell at Newcastle United in 2020, he returned to France in 2022, joining Angers. He moved to Lille a year later, after Angers were relegated from Ligue 1, describing the move as “a return to my roots”.

Unbeknown to player and club, the transfer carried portents of the sombre fate that awaited him. During his medical examination, the club’s doctors discovered an inflammation — known as myocarditis — in the muscle in his heart. It would require several weeks of tests and MRI scans before Bentaleb could finally be announced as a Lille player.

He immediately became a fixture in the Lille starting XI alongside fellow midfielder Benjamin Andre, helping them finish fourth in Ligue 1, enough for a place in the Champions League’s third qualifying round. “When I look at a player and his performances, I try to see if he corresponds to my way of playing,” said the head coach at the time, Paulo Fonseca. “With Nabil, it was obvious.”

The only false note for Bentaleb was a squandered spot kick against Aston Villa in the Conference League as Lille exited on penalties in the quarter-finals. Although he failed to prevent Algeria’s group-phase elimination at the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2024, he was one of the three finalists for the Prix Marc-Vivien Foe — awarded annually to the outstanding African player in Ligue 1 — alongside Paris Saint-Germain’s Achraf Hakimi and eventual winner Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, then of Marseille.

Bentaleb shields the ball from Nantes’ Florent Mollet in May 2024 (Sebastien Salom-Gomis/AFP via Getty Images)

There were few clouds on his horizon when he met up to play football with a group of friends on an artificial pitch in Lille on the evening of Tuesday, June 18. “It was a little kickabout between friends,” Nabil’s elder brother, Karim, tells The Athletic. “We were going to play an eight-a-side match, pretty chilled, pretty relaxed, between mates.”

The game had barely started when Bentaleb abruptly stopped running, sat down and then collapsed on the ground. His brother, Karim, immediately rushed to him and began to perform CPR. By remarkable chance, a nurse who happened to be passing by noticed the commotion and helped Karim to use a defibrillator — located in the changing rooms — on his stricken brother. Within minutes, an ambulance had taken Nabil Bentaleb to Lille University Hospital in the southwest of the city. Very quickly, the news began to spread.

“I’d played padel with him the day before,” recalls Kader Hassan, a football coach who has known Bentaleb since his Tottenham days. “I thought he wanted to do an individual football session with me the next day, so I sent him a message, but I didn’t get a reply. People told me that Nabil had had a heart attack and I was stunned. In my last message, I’d proposed a time for us to meet and he hadn’t replied. So when I heard, I was shocked.”

On social media, team-mates past and present voiced their anguish. “My Nabil, be your strongest in these moments, all our thoughts are with you. Pray very, very hard for Nabil. We love you,” wrote his Lille team-mate Remy Cabella on Instagram. Former Schalke colleague Amine Harit wrote: “Prayers for my brother Nabil. We are with you.” Lille and the Algerian Football Federation both published messages of support.

As his loved ones anxiously waited for news, tormented by the cruellest uncertainty, Bentaleb spent two nights in a coma before eventually being brought round by the hospital’s doctors. The first obstacle, and the gravest, had been overcome.

“I went to see him at the hospital once he’d come round from the coma,” says friend and physiotherapist Bachar Hamdan, who would become Bentaleb’s companion on his training runs in Lille’s Parc du Heron. “He’d only just woken up and he had pain everywhere. 

“When I saw that he was awake, I was very happy. I didn’t know at that point what was going to happen to him. But in any case, he was alive.

“At the beginning, it was tricky. He couldn’t really communicate. When you come out of a coma, you need a bit of time to re-adapt. But it didn’t matter. Being able to speak to him felt like the first victory. He said: ‘Thank you for coming to see me’. It was a very affecting, very special moment.”

Shortly afterwards, Bentaleb was fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). As he came to terms with what had happened to him and the strength gradually began to return to his battered body, he inevitably started to wonder whether he would be able to resume his career. A call to a former Tottenham team-mate helped to give him hope.

Christian Eriksen, who played with Bentaleb at Spurs between 2013 and 2016, suffered a cardiac arrest while playing for Denmark at Euro 2020, but returned to action eight months later after being fitted with a defibrillator. Along with Welsh centre-back Tom Lockyer, who suffered a cardiac arrest playing for Luton Town in December 2023, the Dane provided the Lille midfielder with a shaft of light amid the fog.

Eriksen and Bentaleb celebrating a goal for Tottenham in 2015 (Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images)

“When I was still at the hospital, I had the chance to speak to Eriksen, who helped me enormously,” Bentaleb later said at the press conference announcing his comeback. “And also to Tom Lockyer, who’d been through the same thing. They helped reassure me because I was in the dark and I didn’t know which way to turn. They warned me about what lay ahead. So I knew I’d have doubts, but that it was completely normal.”

Eriksen introduced Bentaleb to Dr Harald Jorstad, the Amsterdam-based cardiologist who had overseen his own recovery programme three years earlier. With Dr Jorstad’s guidance, the contours of the long path back to the pitch began to swim into focus.

For Bentaleb’s family, the thought of him resuming an activity that had almost cost him his life inevitably provoked feelings of concern, but they took solace from the careful reassurance of his doctors.

“We asked ourselves lots of questions,” says Karim. “Because we’re not doctors and we didn’t know anything about it, we had questions that needed answering.

“But the doctors were very, very professional. They took things step-by-step in the recovery process, so there wasn’t really any room for doubt. Everything was very well coordinated between Nabil, the club and the doctors.”

In consultation with the French Football Federation’s (FFF) medical commission, Lille president Olivier Letang convened a video call in September 2024 with Dr Jorstad and cardiologists from France, Belgium and Switzerland, during which a five-phase recovery protocol was put in place.

Bentaleb had spent the time since his accident resting up at home in Lille with his wife and three children. Shortly after the video call, he travelled to Amsterdam with Hamdan, who it had been agreed would coordinate the first two phases of his recovery, to meet Dr Jorstad and his team of physiotherapists.

“We did the first sessions in Amsterdam with the physios there,” says Hamdan, who has worked with Bentaleb since his time at Spurs. “Then it was up to me to take the lead from the following week onwards.

“I got to know Nabil a bit better on that trip. We shared a hotel room and we’d go for walks around Amsterdam. We talked about one thing and another: life, lots of different things, not just medical stuff. He’s very down-to-earth, positive, always looking for the good in things. You don’t meet many people like that.

“We’d done one session and in the afternoon, we went out to eat and have a walk around. He was already telling me: ‘I’m going to come back. I’m going to come back strong’. I don’t think he ever doubted himself.”

Once back in Lille, Bentaleb’s rehabilitation began in earnest. The first phase of his recovery protocol involved light fitness work, which Hamdan oversaw at his clinic in nearby Roubaix. The midfielder wore a pectoral cardiac monitor during the sessions, allowing Hamdan to track his heart rate via a fitness app called Polar Beat.

“You have all the data in real time regarding heart rate: which zone we’re in, which zone we need to be in, which zone we can’t be in, etc,” Hamdan explains. 

“I’d have my phone in front of me and I’d tell him: ‘OK, you’re going to accelerate a bit more, you’re going to slow down a bit, now we’ve gone a bit over so we’re going to slow down’. It was OK to go past certain limits, but we had to see how he reacted to it. We had to be prudent and vigilant.

“Every day, we noted down all the exercises we’d done in an Excel spreadsheet and then we entered all the data: max heart rate, average heart rate. That enabled us to see how Nabil was progressing and told us whether or not we could continue. Every week, I noted things down and sent it off to Dr Harald.”

Professor Dan Augustine, the medical director of Sports Cardiology UK, says that athletes fitted with defibrillators require psychological support when they start to exercise again.

“A defibrillator works by detecting abnormal, life-threatening heart rhythms,” he tells The Athletic. “In the event of an abnormal rhythm, it will try to pace the heart back into a normal rhythm, using something called anti-tachycardia pacing. If that doesn’t work, it will shock the patient’s heart — akin to a defibrillator on the outside with pads.

“In addition to any physical concerns, you need to anticipate the potential psychological impact of a player receiving a shock while playing. A U.S. study of 440 athletes who resumed sport after being fitted with a defibrillator showed that one-third subsequently received shocks and of those, a third of the time, it happened when they were playing sport.

“So defibrillator shocks do happen during sport, but not in the majority. An athlete who received a shock would have to immediately stop playing and undergo reassessment.”

Reassured by the guidance of Dr Jorstad and his colleagues, Bentaleb began the lengthy process of turning himself back into an elite athlete.

“Phase one wasn’t much in terms of exercises,” says Hamdan. “It was simple exercises that weren’t very tiring, that even a non-athlete could have done without raising their heart rate too much: walking on a treadmill for 10-15 minutes, cycling at low speed, muscle-strengthening exercises without weights, using only his own bodyweight.

“Phase two meant that we had the right to take his heart rate a bit higher, so it was a case of increasing the speed: on the running machine, on the bike. Every week, we increased things a little bit, depending on our results, and we started doing different kinds of work.

“Then, in the second part of phase two, we started running outside and that’s when we went running in the woods. It was like a full pre-season. I said to him: ‘You’ve probably never done so much physical preparation’. Even in his misfortune, he found something.”

Bentaleb’s successful completion of the first two phases of his recovery protocol showed Lille that his comeback was on track. In late October 2024, he visited his team-mates at their Domaine de Luchin training base. “It’s a difficult period for him, but coming in and being close to the squad does him good,” said centre-back Bafode Diakite. “We think about him all the time and we try to keep a connection with him.”

Phase three was one-on-one football training with Hassan, a professional footballer turned technical skills coach whose clients include Brentford forward Bryan Mbeumo. The pair would convene at a football complex in Lille’s northern La Madeleine district for training sessions lasting between 45 and 60 minutes. By now, it had been five months since Bentaleb last laced up his boots for a top-level match. Not that it showed.

“Nabil had been through something extremely rare, but the guy had lost nothing,” Hassan recalls. “In terms of intensity, he was still going full blast. I didn’t see him dragging his feet at a single training session. It was incredible — the mental strength he had, the determination.

“I thought we were going to start off gently and pick things up bit by bit. But he was like: ‘No, Kader, come on — let’s step things up’. The guy is a machine. He’s got a pacemaker under his skin. I’d be slamming passes into him and when they arrived at chest height, rather than putting his hand out to stop the ball, he’d control it on his chest! I told him: ‘You’re a madman!’. But he’d say: ‘Don’t worry about it’.

“We trained every day for three months. We even trained on December 25 and January 1. He still hadn’t been told that he’d be able to resume his career. But he wanted to be prepared for it. He’s one of the toughest guys I’ve ever coached.”

As Bentaleb was put through his paces on the training pitch, Lille officials were working away behind the scenes to get his return to competitive action rubber-stamped by the FFF.

It was by no means a foregone conclusion — at the time, footballers fitted with defibrillators were forbidden from playing professional football in France. A similar ban in Italy had obliged Eriksen to leave Inter Milan three years earlier. He re-joined Brentford in the Premier League instead.

It had been agreed that it would only be once Bentaleb had completed the third phase of his recovery protocol that Lille could formally request permission for him to resume his career. He reached that juncture in December and, a few weeks later, in mid-January, Lille sent a dossier detailing the steps that he had undertaken to the French federation.

By now, Bentaleb was training on his own at Lille’s training centre and desperately hoping for a favourable outcome. “He felt ready,” says Hamdan. “He’d say: ‘I hope it goes my way, I hope it goes my way’. His only desire was to get back on the pitch with his team-mates.”

At last, the verdict fell. On February 12, the FFF’s medical commission gave Bentaleb the green light to return to competitive action, marking a watershed moment in the French football history. He made his return to training the next day.

In a touching moment captured for posterity by Lille’s social media team, Bentaleb emerged from the first-team changing room to be confronted by a long guard of honour formed of club staff and players from the Lille academy flanking the path to the training pitches. Several of his team-mates, who had exited the changing rooms behind him, dashed to the end of the line to extend the row of well-wishers yet further.

Naturally reserved in character, Bentaleb hesitated as he neared his welcome committee and had to be forcibly ushered forward by skipper Andre to take their acclaim alone. Smiling bashfully as he walked between the two lines of people, he murmured the occasional “merci” and returned their applause with applause of his own.

Tout un club derrière toi Nabil ❤️

Salariés, éducateurs, jeunes de la formation, tous se sont mobilisés pour accueillir Nabil Bentaleb à son retour 👏

On est heureux de te revoir @nabilbentaleb42 😍 pic.twitter.com/OgPztAu2oN

— LOSC (@losclive) February 13, 2025

“I thought it was just going to be a normal training session,” he told a press conference the following day. “And at the last minute, Benjamin Andre let me go out in front of him and I saw all the people. It was very moving. I don’t know how to thank them all.”

Sitting beside him at the press conference, club president Letang reflected on the trials and tribulations of the previous eight months. “From the moment Nabil woke up on June 20, we kept hearing the same thing, which was that it was impossible, it will never happen, no professional athlete in France has ever played again after going through what Nabil went through,” he said.

“It’s been a very long journey and there’s a lot of emotion today. Nabil’s example shows that even if everyone tells you: ‘No, it’s impossible, it’s never going to happen’, if you want it and if you have the motivation to make things happen, you can do it.

“It’s a very special moment today. I’ll remember this journey all my life.”

According to the recovery protocol, phase four would involve fitness training with the team, with phase five being a return to full training and matches. But Bentaleb had done so much individual preparation that he was already in a position to make a phased return to first-team action.

“Physically, he’s one of the most prepared players in the squad because he’s worked a huge amount over the last few months,” said head coach Bruno Genesio, who had succeeded Fonseca the previous summer.

When Genesio’s squad took off from Lille Airport on the morning of February 16 for their Ligue 1 fixture at Rennes that evening, Bentaleb was on board. Up until four days previously, he hadn’t even known if he would ever enter a French stadium as a professional footballer again.

Named on the bench for the game, Bentaleb looked happy and relaxed before kick-off at Roazhon Park. But when the TV camera alighted on him again as he went out to warm up along the touchline early in the second half, glancing around the stadium while tugging on a pair of navy-blue gloves, he wore an apprehensive look.

With 14 minutes remaining, and the score 0-0, the moment that he had spent the last eight months dreaming about finally arrived. Coming on in place of 20-year-old team-mate Ngal’ayel Mukau, he closed his eyes, whispered a prayer to himself and pointed to the sky as he crossed the touchline. The Lille fans in the away section bellowed in support. Watching alone at home, his brother, Karim, could not believe his eyes.

“I didn’t think he was going to play,” Karim confesses. “I just thought he was in the squad and that going on the trip was the next phase in his recovery. I thought he might get on in one of the following matches. So I was really happy, but very, very surprised.” 

Wearing a white base layer and long white cycling shorts beneath his side’s all-white away strip, Lille’s No 6 was quickly involved, coolly bringing down Andre’s chested lay-off in the middle of the pitch and knocking a pass to right-back Thomas Meunier with his trusty left foot. After all the fear, all the doubts, all the questions and all the toil, after 243 days in the wilderness, he was a footballer again.

Bentaleb made his return to professional action in February (Lille)

Moments later, Lille won a corner on the left. Mitchel Bakker swung in a cross, Chuba Akpom nodded the ball towards goal, Brice Samba sprang to his left to save and there — suddenly, miraculously, remarkably, unfathomably — was Bentaleb at the back post to steer the rebound into the net. He had been on the pitch for three minutes and 50 seconds.

The instinctive run that had carried him into the six-yard box turned into a parabola that sent him racing back down the middle of the pitch. He smiled, puffed out his cheeks, shooed away his jubilant team-mates, his eyes shining.

Bentaleb celebrates his goal, four minutes into his comeback (Jean-Francois Monier/AFP via Getty Images)

Arriving in front of the dugouts, he disappeared into a scrum of wildly celebrating team-mates and staff members.

February 16: Nabil Bentaleb's day 🇩🇿🥹 pic.twitter.com/bVkDukKeFn

— Ligue 1 English (@Ligue1_ENG) February 16, 2025

The ultimate comeback story had delivered the ultimate comeback moment.

“I couldn’t believe it!” says his brother, Karim. “I was so happy, so pleased. You have a kind of flashback to everything that’s happened. You say to yourself: ‘We’ve finally got there’. There were lots of messages from the people who had been around him. It was nothing but happiness.”

Hamdan, Bentaleb’s steadfast partner on those training runs in the Parc du Heron, was also watching on TV at home.

“When I saw him on the bench, and I’m sure everyone around him had the same reaction, I had goosebumps,” he says. “I felt so proud. You can’t even explain it. 

“When he comes on, he nearly sets up a goal straight away. You think: ‘Nabil is really incredible’. And then when he scores… when he scores, I want to cry. I have tears of joy in my eyes. I was watching with my wife, who doesn’t follow football, and even she was emotional. I don’t even know how to describe what happened because it was so incredible.”

At the final whistle, a goal by Akpom having sealed a 2-0 win for the away side, Bentaleb’s team-mates and members of the Lille coaching staff flocked towards him one by one. After throwing his shirt to the delighted away fans massed at the foot of the Tribune Rennes, he expressed his emotions in a pitch-side interview with DAZN.

“It’s my first goal with Lille,” Bentaleb said, the disbelief on his face still plain to see, as the stadium emptied around him. “I played the whole of last season without scoring. It had to happen like this. I hadn’t pictured scoring. But I’ve been visualising coming on and helping my friends for eight months.

“It was incredible. They’re images that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”

Once back in the changing room, he wept.

Inevitably, given the length and nature of his absence, Bentaleb has only featured sparingly for Lille since that magical night in Rennes. But although his six subsequent appearances have included just one start, he successfully completed the full 90 minutes in that 4-1 defeat against PSG.

Bentaleb played every minute of Lille’s game against PSG in March (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)

One frustration for Bentaleb, during his long rehabilitation, was the knowledge that he was missing out on Lille’s campaign in the Champions League, which included wins against Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Feyenoord in the league phase before falling to Borussia Dortmund in the last 16.

But it has only doubled the 30-year-old’s determination to play his part in making sure the Champions League anthem echoes around Stade Pierre-Mauroy again next season. An eventual return to action with Algeria, by whom he has been capped 53 times, is in his sights as well.

Whatever happens with Lille over the season’s final weeks and whatever the future might hold for him beyond that, Bentaleb advances in the knowledge that, like Eriksen before him, he has turned his career, and indeed his life, into nothing less than a testament to the formidable resilience of the human spirit.

“It’s been the biggest ordeal of my life,” Bentaleb said in a short film produced by Lille about his comeback.

“I found out who I was in those moments. I thought a difficult ordeal was losing a match or missing a penalty against Aston Villa, but it’s not. It’s the ordeals of life and we all have them. I had this one.

“But I didn’t do it alone. I was helped. I don’t think I’d have succeeded on my own, if I hadn’t been surrounded by my family, my parents, my friends, my big brother, my sisters, my children, my wife. That environment helped me to keep getting up and keep seeing the positives amid all the negatives.

“It’s a cliche, but it’s true. It’s not about how you fall, but how you get up.”

Bentaleb fell, but he got up. Then he ran and he ran and he ran.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)