Author’s note: Throughout this essay, I use the term “football,” the name used throughout most of the world and by FIFA itself. Readers in Canada and the United States may know the sport as soccer, but for the purposes of this reflection, football feels true to both the game and my own connection to it.
It is World Cup season, and I have become completely absorbed in the matches. The drama. The national pride. The last-minute goals. The penalty kicks. The heartbreak. The impossible saves. I love every minute of it. And, of course, France is my team. As a dual French and Canadian citizen, there is never much debate in our house about who I’ll be cheering for when Les Bleus take the field.
Like millions of others, I have found myself talking back to the television. “How did he miss that?” “He should have passed sooner.” “The keeper should have seen that coming.” Watching from my couch, everything feels obvious.
Then, somewhere between another replay and another confident opinion, I caught myself. Because I spend my days asking people not to judge themselves by a single moment. Medicine has taught me that hindsight is one of the most persuasive storytellers we know. Once the diagnosis is confirmed, the right answer seems obvious. Once the scan comes back, we wonder how we could have missed it. Once a difficult conversation has ended, we replay every sentence we wish we had spoken differently.
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But medicine is not practiced in hindsight. It is practiced in real time. Just like football.
The player on the field is not watching the match from above. They are making decisions in seconds. They are reading movement, balancing risk, adjusting to new information, carrying the weight of expectation, fatigue, pressure, and consequence. The game moves far too quickly for perfection.
Medicine is no different. We make decisions with incomplete information. We balance competing possibilities. We care for people whose stories are still unfolding. We rarely have the luxury of certainty before action is required.
That does not mean mistakes do not matter. They matter deeply. Accountability matters. Reflection matters. Learning matters. But shame, by itself, has never been an effective teacher.
One of the things I admire most about elite football is not the brilliance. It is the recovery. A midfielder loses possession and immediately chases the ball. A striker misses an open net and still asks for the next pass. A goalkeeper concedes a goal and begins organizing the defense before the crowd has even stopped celebrating.
No one reaches the World Cup without making mistakes. What distinguishes the best players is not perfection. It is their willingness to remain in the game.
Medicine could learn something from that. We often hold ourselves to a standard we would never expect of anyone else. One missed diagnosis. One difficult outcome. One conversation we wish we had handled differently. One moment that refuses to leave us. Somehow, those moments become larger than the thousands that came before them.
As physicians, we can become experts at extending compassion to everyone except ourselves. We remind our patients that healing is not linear. We reassure families that recovery takes time. We encourage colleagues after difficult days. Yet when we stumble, we often believe we should have known better all along. Perhaps that is hindsight speaking again.
Watching the World Cup, I realized something that surprised me. I have never truly judged a player for missing a pass. I admire the ones who keep asking for the ball. The ones who miss the penalty and still volunteer to take the next one. The ones who lose possession, sprint back on defense, and refuse to let one mistake define the rest of the match.
Somehow, I have always offered athletes that grace. I have not always offered it to myself.
Perhaps excellence was never about playing a flawless game. Perhaps it has always been about learning, adapting, recovering, and returning with a little more wisdom than before.
Because medicine, like football, is not played in slow motion. It is played in real time.
And maybe the measure of a good physician is not that they never miss. Maybe it is that after every difficult day, every uncertain decision, every outcome that stays with them long after the shift has ended, they have the courage to step back onto the field. To ask for the ball again. To keep playing. To keep caring.
That, to me, is what excellence looks like.
Devina Maya Wadhwa is a psychiatrist.
