Cagliari Striker Yael Trepy Leaves Hospital After Near-Fatal Accident

For Cagliari, the fear has finally lifted. For Yael Trepy, life itself has been handed back.

Two weeks after a terrifying swimming pool accident that almost killed him and threatened to end his career before it had truly begun, the young French striker has been discharged from the "Santissima Annunziata" University Hospital in Sassari. He walked out of the building on his own two feet, smiling, his mother at his side. A scene that felt unthinkable on 16 August.

From holiday to horror

The story began in the postcard setting of Baja Sardinia, near the Costa Smeralda. A villa, a pool, a summer break. Then everything went wrong.

Trepy nearly drowned in the water, his life hanging by a thread. The reaction of the emergency services made the difference. They airlifted him to Sassari with the urgency usually reserved for the gravest of cases. Had they been slower, the outcome would almost certainly have been tragic.

He arrived in critical condition and went straight into intensive care. Doctors placed him in a medically induced coma for 48 hours, a decisive move to stabilise his situation and protect his organs. For two days, Cagliari and French football watched and waited, fearing the worst.

Then came the first turning point. Trepy woke up.

From there, the recovery began: cautious, step by step, but always forward. He left intensive care and moved to the pulmonology ward, where specialists monitored his lungs and overall condition. The key news from that phase: no major physical damage. The body of a professional athlete, combined with rapid intervention and skilled care, had resisted the trauma.

Not a miracle, a system that worked

Inside the hospital, nobody wanted to dress this up as something mystical. They preferred to point to preparation, coordination and competence.

Professor Pietro Pirina, director of the department of clinical and interventional pulmonology at Sassari University Hospital, summed it up in a statement to "Sky Sport": Trepy is leaving in “generally good clinical condition” after a period that showed “gradual and marked recovery.” The tests, he explained, kept improving, allowing the medical team to plan his discharge “with peace of mind.”

Some had called it a miracle. Pirina chose different words. For him, this was the proof of “a system that has proven its effectiveness” — from the first emergency call to the helicopter transfer, from intensive care to the final checks before discharge.

Behind the headlines, that system quietly did its job. And a 20-year-old footballer now has a future again.

The road ahead

On the day of his release, Trepy did not sneak out through a side door. He greeted the medical staff, the general director and the medical director of the hospital, then stepped outside with that broad smile that said more than any statement could.

His journey, though, is not over. The next stop is Arco, in the province of Trento, where he will begin a structured rehabilitation programme. There, specialists will test not just his lungs and muscles, but his capacity to return to the brutal demands of professional football.

Only after further detailed examinations will doctors decide whether he can be cleared to compete again. No shortcuts, no sentimentality. Just hard data, medical prudence and the player’s own responses.

For now, the victory is simple and enormous: Yael Trepy is alive, conscious, walking, and out of hospital. The rest – whether he pulls on the Cagliari shirt again, whether he fulfils the promise that first brought him to Sardinia – will be written in the coming months.

But after what happened in that pool in Baja Sardinia, the fact there is a “coming months” at all already feels like the most important result of his young career.