Right now, as I write this, 48 nations are chasing a single ball across 16 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It is the largest World Cup ever staged, and for the first time since 2010, every football confederation on the planet has a team in the tournament. Billions of us will watch the world’s most beautiful game — a game played, fittingly enough, with the foot.
Let me tell you about a different world cup. This one doesn’t end on July 19. Its trophy isn’t gold — it’s a human being still standing, still walking, still in remission: ulcer-free, hospital-free, and activity-rich.
A few days ago I received a note that made my week. Anica Badanjak, a diabetologist in Croatia, wrote to say that she and her colleague Anela Novak had translated the 2023 IWGDF Guidelines into Croatian. She asked — almost apologetically — whether I might highlight their work so it would be taken seriously by the clinicians and decision-makers who most need to see it.
Anica, Anela: the honor is entirely mine. And your contribution is bigger than you may realize.
With the Croatian translation now live at iwgdfguidelines.org, the International Working Group on the Diabetic Foot Guidelines are now available in a native language on every inhabited continent on Earth. Every single one. Take the tour with me:
In Europe, they now speak Croatian — alongside German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Czech, Slovenian, Serbian, and Macedonian. Cross into Asia and you’ll find them in Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Russian, and Turkish. In Africa, they live in Arabic and in French, with a dedicated Tunisian adaptation. Across the Americas, they’re read in English, Spanish, and French to the north, and in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish to the south. And in Oceania, our colleagues at Diabetes Feet Australia built an adaptation all their own. Six inhabited continents; one shared standard of care.
Here is the part I cannot resist. Croatia — the very country whose clinicians just handed their patients this gift — has, at this very moment, marched into the World Cup knockout round, where they meet Portugal. So while eleven Croatians chase glory on the pitch, two Croatian clinicians have quietly delivered something that will outlast any tournament: evidence-based guidance, in their own patients’ language, that can keep a foot attached to a leg and a person attached to their life.
This is what I love most about our strange and wonderful field. We are a global squad assembled from the unlikeliest of positions — podiatrists and vascular surgeons, endocrinologists and infectious-disease physicians, nurses and engineers and translators — all working the same ball toward the same goal. A guideline is only as powerful as the number of people who can actually read it. Every translation is an assist. Every adaptation is a perfectly weighted through-ball to a clinician who can finally make the save.
To Anica Badanjak and Anela Novak: thank you for the assist heard round the world. To the IWGDF — to Jaap van Netten, Sicco Bus, and the whole editorial team — and to the army of translators on every continent: you have turned an evidence base into a common language.
And if your language is not yet on that list, consider this your call-up. The pitch is global. The goal is identical everywhere: more days walking, fewer amputations, a foot in remission. Let’s keep putting unlikely ideas together with wonderful people — in every tongue on Earth– where there is no elimination round.
Game on. 🌍⚽🦶
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