I watched a padel match recently between the world's best pair and two opponents who never had a chance. The scoreline ended 6-0, 6-1. For most of it, the crowd was quiet in the specific way crowds go quiet when the outcome stopped being in doubt somewhere around game four of the first set.
Then, somewhere in the second set, the losing pair broke serve. Won a game. The score moved from something like 4-0 to 4-1.
The crowd applauded.
I have not stopped thinking about that applause since. It was not loud. It was not particularly long. But it was, without question, one of the saddest sounds I have heard at a sporting event — and I could not work out, in the moment or since, exactly what it meant. Was it support? Consolation? Was some portion of it, uncomfortably, amused? The players on the losing side could not have known either. They just received the noise, the way applause is always received: as a single undifferentiated signal, with no way to unpack what was inside it.
The Assumption We Never Examine
Applause seems like the simplest communication system in sport. Something good happens, people clap, the volume and duration roughly track the size of the thing that happened. A tap-in gets polite acknowledgment. A wonder-strike gets a roar. The system appears to have one input and one output, and everyone involved seems to agree on what it means without ever discussing it.
This is mostly true, and it is also almost completely wrong, because applause is not one signal. It is a single physical gesture — hands meeting, repeated, at some volume — that gets used to encode at least half a dozen structurally different, and sometimes directly contradictory, emotional messages. The gesture stays the same. What is inside it changes constantly, and the person receiving it has no reliable way to tell which version they just got.
The Many Things a Clap Can Mean
Genuine celebration is the baseline everyone assumes. A goal, a winning shot, a moment of real quality, applauded in proportion to how good it actually was. This is the version of applause that requires no further thought, which is exactly why it sets the expectation for every other version.
Narrative satisfaction is a different thing entirely. When Robin van Persie scored for Fenerbahçe against Manchester United, years after leaving the club as one of its most decorated forwards, the reaction from the crowd was not primarily about the technical quality of the finish. It was about a story landing correctly — the ageing player, the homecoming, the proof that something still worked. A fairly ordinary goal can receive an extraordinary ovation if the story around it is heavy enough. The crowd is applauding meaning, not skill.
Relief from tension shows up most clearly in a penalty shootout. The save, the miss, the moment the unbearable waiting resolves into something — the applause that follows is not really about the quality of the save. It is the discharge of accumulated anxiety that had nowhere else to go.
Compassionate applause is the padel match. The crowd is not celebrating a return to competitiveness — the match, by that point, had none left. They are acknowledging, in the only language a crowd has, that the losing side is still human, still trying, and does not deserve to be completely erased by the scoreline. This is applause directed at the person rather than the performance — a way of saying we see you, and we are sorry, and also we would like this to feel slightly less brutal for everyone involved, including us.
Social obligation is the emptiest version — the polite clap at the end of something forgettable, present only because stopping would feel conspicuously unkind. It carries almost no individual meaning. It exists because groups conform, and silence in that moment would say more than anyone wants to say out loud.
Applause as apology happens when a crowd that turned on a player earlier in a match — booing a poor touch, groaning at a misplaced pass — applauds generously the moment he does something good. Part of that applause is genuine. Part of it is a crowd quietly making amends for what it said fifteen minutes earlier, without ever having to admit that's what it's doing.
Applause as farewell is the standing ovation for a substituted player nearing the end of a career. It is rarely about the specific ninety minutes just played. It is decades, arriving all at once, in one sustained sound that has almost nothing to do with what just happened on the pitch.
The Gap Nobody Can See Across
Here is the part that makes this genuinely unsettling rather than just an interesting taxonomy: the person receiving the applause cannot tell which version they are getting.
The losing padel pair, hearing that applause after finally winning a game, had no way to separate genuine warmth from pity from the small, uncomfortable possibility that some of it was quiet amusement at how far they'd fallen behind. The signal arrives identical regardless of source. Hands meeting at a certain volume for a certain duration. The emotional content — celebration, relief, compassion, apology, obligation — is invisible from the outside, encoded in a gesture that has no dialect for distinguishing between them.
This is social signaling ambiguity — the gap between what a signal is intended to communicate and what the receiver actually experiences. Humans built an entire communication system around a physical action — the clap — treating it as if it reliably transmits a single, legible emotion, when in fact it is closer to a universal container that can carry almost anything, including things that contradict each other inside the same thirty seconds.
The recipient is left doing the interpretive work alone, usually under conditions — public performance, competitive pressure, personal exposure — that make careful interpretation the last thing they have capacity for. A losing player, mid-match, hearing an ambiguous ovation, does not get to pause and workshop what it might mean. They absorb it instantly, as encouragement or pity or something in between, and play the next point regardless.
Why This Matters Beyond Sport
The same ambiguity exists everywhere applause exists — the office presentation clapped through by colleagues who are relieved it's over rather than impressed by its content, the parent applauding a child's mediocre performance because withholding it would be a different kind of cruelty, the retirement speech applauded partly for the years and only partly for the speech itself.
Nobody examines this closely because examining it would make an enormous number of ordinary, well-intentioned social moments considerably more awkward than they currently feel. It is easier to let the gesture do its work unexamined — to let a clap be a clap — than to ask, every time, what exactly is being communicated and whether the person on the receiving end is getting anything close to what was intended.
But every so often, a scoreline gets lopsided enough, or a career ends publicly enough, or a moment becomes narratively loaded enough, that the ambiguity becomes impossible to ignore. The clap sounds exactly the same as it always does. And for one uncomfortable moment, everyone in the room quietly wonders what it actually meant — including, most of all, the person it was for.
misterillahi•Sep 20, 2026 Roland Garros, 2022.
Zheng Qinwen, 19 years old at the time, just took a set from Iga Swiatek. The world number one.
One more set. But then her period came.
She called a medical timeout. Her trainer immediately wrapped her leg, but her leg was fine. It was her stomach. The cramps were so bad she could not play her own tennis anymore.
Yes, those very cramps. The menstrual cramps every woman recognizes too well.
She lost the match.
At her post match interview, she explained:
"The first day is always so tough. I have to do sport and I always have so much pain on the first day. I couldn't go against my nature. I wish I can be a man on court, but I cannot."
Then she added the three words,
"It's just girls' things, you know."
That was 2022. It has stuck with me since.
I have never played at Roland Garros, of course. My tennis is an amateur game. My biggest trophy is my father-in-law saying "Mantap, te! Finally, you hit the ball." over my clumsy backhand.
But I know Zheng’s words deeply.
Photo by Renith R on Unsplash
The day I killed my friendship
In college, I had a friend. I liked her very much because she was witty and smart. One day she invited me to a discussion about our field project. A friendly, before lunch discussion. Nothing offensive at all.
Small problem: I was PMS-ing.
So in the heat of a small argument, instead of being a civilized woman saying "can we revisit this tomorrow morning, over a coffee perhaps?", nope, I called her "anjing lu".
For my non Indonesian readers: it means "you dog". Sounds not-so-bad in English. But in my culture, when it comes from a girl's mouth, it is a big cultural disaster. Women here are raised to be soft spoken, and well mannered. We often find ourselves apologizing too many times for mistakes we did not even make.
And yep, we never really talked again. She cut me off before I could say sorry.
Honestly? I am not blaming her.
Painfully honest? I would be mad if she didn't cut me off. I know I was way out of line that day.
And here is the part that hurts the most. Even now, when I recall that memory, I have completely forgotten why I called her that. I forgot the whole conversation or even the project. What I remember vividly is the emotion. How badly I wanted to spit that curse word.
Is this real or am I making excuses?
I have PCOS, stands for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.
If you have never heard of it, bless you, your hormones behave. Mine run a 24 hour circus.
Here is the fucked-up part. Science cannot tell me yet why I have it. It is not my diet nor simply my mother's genetics. A Dutch twin study found that PCOS is about 70% inherited, but the genes they have discovered so far only explain around 10% of it.
So, in simple words, researchers know the answer is written somewhere in my body, they are just stuck. At this point, I only hope they did not stop digging.
No, I am not saying every mood swinger woman has PCOS. But for sure, every woman has a hormone cycle. That part is undeniable.
But, mine is just… so freaking loud.
How loud? In one Danish study, 65% of women with PCOS reported mood swings, and two out of three had anxiety. And it is not in our heads. One likely reason is boring and very real: too much male hormones quietly mess with the brain chemicals that control mood.
So where a normal cycle makes a woman cry at a Thailand insurance advertisement, mine makes me end a dear friendship before lunch. Same old song that you have probably heard over and over, just at the loudest volume.
So, yeah. Flash news, it is not drama. It is what it is.
Now, Tennis
Yes, tennis. Trust me on this.
I watch Grand Slams from my sofa. One night it hit me.
Have you ever wondered why tennis-muggle can easily name Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, but not a single women's player?
Serena Williams? Sure. But have you heard of Jabeur, Swiatek, Sakkari, Kostyuk, Raducanu, Osaka, or Sabalenka?
Men's tennis has the same champions for twenty years. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic. Now Alcaraz and Sinner, trading finals like two kids passing one trophy back and forth. They even joke about it. I am not making that up.
Women's tennis? From my sofa, it looks completely different.
Wimbledon just crowned its ninth first time champion in a row. Nine years, nine different names.
Osaka won big, then disappeared. Raducanu won once, never came back. Swiatek dominates, then loses to someone you have never heard of.
Experts and amateurs alike blame the depth of the field. The pressure. The coaching changes. The "why-women-have-slower-response-time" theory. Sure, sure. Name it all.
But there is one variable nobody even mentions: these athletes play a brutal sport while riding a hormone cycle that hits strength, sleep, and mood every single month.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying.
I am not saying women are too hormonal to win consistently. That is the lazy, sexist take I grew up hearing, and it is complete bullshit.
I am saying the opposite: they perform at the highest level on earth while carrying something the men's tour never has to think about, and nobody even counts it. It is not an excuse for losing. It is an invisible tax every woman pays, every month, quietly.
Aryna, I feel you
Aryna Sabalenka. Four Grand Slam titles. Even Serena Williams' coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, calls her tennis probably the best on tour. Have you watched how she plays? Her serve once hit 133 mph, or 214 km per hour. The second fastest serve ever recorded in women's tennis. Even my car can't go that fast.
And yet. All four titles on hard courts. Roland Garros and Wimbledon: zero. She keeps reaching Grand Slam finals and losing them, four runner up finishes in recent years. And this year at the French Open, in the quarterfinal against Diana Shnaider, she won the first set, went up 4-1, and was two points from winning while serving for the match at 5-4. Then she lost 12 of the last 13 games.
After that match, a reporter asked about her thoughts and emotions. She answered:
"No thoughts, no emotions. Just want to quit tennis right now."
And later:
"I just am so tired of me losing some matches not in the best way just because I was overemotional."
Drama? Don't think so. She has said it more than once.
And this is not new for her. Back in 2022, she cried on court because she suddenly could not serve. Hundreds of double faults in one season, over a serve motion she had done a million times.
Now, do I know if Sabalenka has PCOS? Definitely not. I am not her doctor. I am a random Indonesian woman watching her game from my sofa, snacking low calorie chips, watching my sugar intake, feeling personally attacked.
But she sure has a cycle. Every woman on that tour does. And mine, the loud version, gave me years of private lessons on what it looks like when your own body votes against you in the middle of something important.
So when I watch her cry on court over a failed serve in 2022, I do not think "weak", "shame", or "failure".
I think "oh, I feel you, girl. That's our thing. Girls' thing."
Photo by Keith Allison on Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Why I only play tennis with people who know me
I play tennis too. But with one strict rule: only with my husband and my in laws. People who have seen the worst tennis version of me and, for some reason, stayed. Or maybe they just choose not to judge me. Either way, that is why I respect them.
Frankly, my tennis spills my mood.
Good hormone day: in my head, I am Sabalenka. Once I've ruined my racket trying to imitate her serve. Bad hormone day: I can miss a ball that is not even moving.
Once I tested myself and joined a session on Reclub, an app for finding people to play sports with, basically Tinder but for active human beings. I sucked so badly, one guy taught me how to grip the racket. Forgodsake, I have played tennis for years. I know what continental grip is.
The only difference between me and Sabalenka is scale. When she cries and collapses, the whole world writes about her mental state.
When I miss lots of balls and get mad at my racket, only my husband knows. And after years of marriage, he has learned the most important skill in understanding a woman at her hormonal peak: saying nothing and passing the cold water.
The point
No. This is not a free pass to call your best friend anjing (Hell, no). There is no hormone level that makes that acceptable. I still owe her an apology. If she is reading this: I am sorry, and you were right about the project. Probably. I honestly do not remember the project.
The point is simpler. Women are hormonal. Yes. It is hormones, not character.
And painfully honest? We cannot fully control it. I have tried. The hormones won, no matter how hard I tried to reverse it. Most days, I end up trying to reduce my interaction with the world.
So please, do not define who a woman is based on who she was when her hormones were driving. She was still the driver. She just had something screaming in the passenger seat, so loud she went numb and could not think straight. Hormones explain the crash, but after the crash, we don't forget who was behind the wheel.
Zheng called it “just girls’ things”.
She was being polite. It is that invisible tax I told you about. Paid every month, by half of this planet’s population. No medical timeout is long enough to cover it, and nobody gets a trophy for surviving it.
The least woman can do is admit it is on the court.
And not being judged by it.
The first time a footballer steps onto a padel court, something slightly strange tends to happen.
They look like they have done this before.
Not the technique — the grip is wrong, the swing is unfamiliar, the overhead is a work in progress. But the movement is right. The positioning is right. The reading of where the ball is going before it gets there is right. Experienced padel players watching from the outside notice it almost immediately. The footwork looks trained. The anticipation looks automatic. The court sense looks like something that took years to build.
It did. Just not on a padel court.
The Transfer Nobody Planned
Padel is the fastest growing sport in the world. From 25 million players in 2020 to over 25 million in Europe alone by 2024, with new courts appearing in cities that had never heard of the game five years earlier. And running through its growth, like a thread you notice once you look for it, is an extraordinary concentration of professional footballers.
Gerard Piqué did not just take up padel after retiring from Barcelona. He co-founded the Premier Padel tour — the sport's elite professional circuit — and has become one of its most prominent figures, channelling the same competitive intelligence that made him a world champion into building the infrastructure of an entirely different sport. Neymar plays regularly and visibly. Messi, Sergio Ramos, Karim Benzema, Vinicius Jr — the list of elite footballers with a serious padel habit is long and continues to grow.
This is not coincidence. And it is not simply that footballers are athletic and athletic people pick up new sports quickly. The connection is more specific than that. Football builds a set of cognitive and physical skills that padel rewards almost immediately — skills that take years to develop through any other path, and that arrive fully formed in anyone who has played football seriously.
What Football Actually Builds
The obvious transfer is footwork. Thousands of hours of lateral movement, directional changes, weight shifting — football players arrive on a padel court with movement patterns already grooved that most padel beginners spend months developing. The split step, the recovery run, the ability to change direction without losing balance — none of it needs to be taught to someone who has been doing it since childhood. Watch Chingotto move around the court and you are watching football footwork expressed in padel — fluid, efficient, always in position before the ball arrives. That quality is not taught in padel academies. It is carried in from somewhere else.
But the deeper transfer is what researchers call perceptual learning — the long-term change in perception that results from thousands of hours of practice in a complex, unpredictable environment. Football does not just train the body. It trains the eyes and the brain to extract meaningful information from a moving scene faster and more accurately than an untrained observer. The footballer who has spent years reading defensive lines, tracking runs, and anticipating where the ball will land has developed a perceptual system that is fundamentally different from someone who has not.
Galán makes this visible at the highest level. His nickname — el extraterrestre, the alien — is the padel world's way of acknowledging that his perceptual system is operating at a level most people cannot follow. The angles he reads, the glass he uses, the positions he occupies before the ball arrives — none of it looks physically possible until you understand that he is not reacting to what is happening. He is responding to what he already knew was going to happen. That is perceptual learning at its most developed form.
On a padel court, this perceptual system activates almost immediately. Reading where the ball will go after it hits the back glass, anticipating the opponent's angle before they strike, positioning correctly before the situation demands it — these are perceptual tasks that the football-trained brain has been solving in different configurations for years. The environment is new. The underlying process is not.
Psychologists describe this through contextual interference theory — the finding that skills learned in variable, unpredictable environments transfer better than those learned in controlled, repetitive ones. Football is one of the most chaotic learning environments that exists. No two situations are identical. No outcome is guaranteed. Every session presents new configurations of players, space, pace, and pressure. That variability — which makes football hard to learn — is precisely what makes football skills so portable. The brain trained to adapt constantly adapts to a new court faster than a brain trained to repeat the same controlled movements.
The Wall as a Teammate
The back glass is the single most counterintuitive element of padel for most new players. The instinct, learned from everyday spatial experience, is to treat the ball's contact with the wall as the end of the rally — to expect the point to be over when the ball hits the back. In padel, the wall is the beginning of the next opportunity. The ball comes off it with pace and angle, and the player who reads that angle correctly and positions themselves before the ball arrives wins the exchange.
Football players adapt to this quickly because they already think in terms of using the environment rather than fighting it. The full-back who uses the touchline as a defensive tool, angling their pressure to force the winger toward the line rather than inward. The striker who uses the goalkeeper's position to determine where to place the shot. The wall is not an obstacle. It is a variable in the geometry of the situation — one more surface that changes the direction and pace of the ball, requiring the same spatial calculation football has been demanding for years.
In practice this means footballers develop wall play faster than almost any other group of newcomers. Not because they are more talented, but because the underlying mental model — use the environment, do not fight it — is already installed.
The Partnership Problem
Padel is a doubles sport. Four people on a court, split into two pairs, working as units. And this is where footballers find their most natural home.
The communication, the positioning relative to a partner, the instinct to cover space your partner has vacated, the unspoken understanding of who takes which ball — all of it replicates the dynamics of a football partnership. Coello at the net is the explosive striker — instinctive, reactive, finishing opportunities before defenders can adjust. Tapia behind him is the organiser, the one who reads the situation and has the bravery to take the difficult shot when the point needs to be won. Their partnership in Rome — clinical, composed under a 7-6 second set tiebreak — is exactly what football builds. Not just individual skill. The ability to function as a unit under pressure, to trust without checking, to cover without being asked.
Tennis players arrive with a different set of advantages — stroke production, racquet feel, timing of contact, understanding of spin and pace — that football players genuinely lack early on. The technique gap is real and takes time to close. But the doubles dimension adds a layer that tennis players and football players navigate differently. Neither is better overall. They are different strengths arriving from different directions. The footballer who acquires racquet technique and the tennis player who absorbs court sharing dynamics end up converging on the same place. The routes there are just different.
Why the Obsession Makes Sense
For professional footballers, padel solves a specific problem: what do you do with your competitive instinct when the competitive outlet is not available?
Football at elite level is physically punishing in ways that accumulate over a career. Knees, ankles, hips — the body that spent fifteen years absorbing the demands of professional football does not respond well to the same demands at 35. Padel is lower impact, smaller court, less explosive loading. It provides the competitive structure — the score, the point, the win — without the physical cost. For a body that needs to stay active but cannot sustain the training loads of elite football, padel is the sustainable alternative.
It is also social in a way that golf — the traditional footballer's leisure sport — is not. You play with people. You communicate, strategise, win and lose together. The dressing room dynamic does not disappear at retirement. It relocates to the padel court.
And the improvement curve is addictive. The footballer who arrives on a padel court and finds themselves reading the game almost immediately experiences something most new sports do not provide — the feeling of being competent earlier than expected. Competence feels good. Rapid improvement feels better. The faster you get better, the more you want to play. Football's cognitive gift to padel players is not just that they perform well. It is that they experience progress quickly enough to fall in love with the sport before the novelty wears off.
Same Brain, Different Court
What the football-to-padel transfer really illustrates is something broader about how skills work.
We tend to think of sports as distinct — different rules, different equipment, different physical demands. And at the surface level they are. But underneath the surface is a layer of cognitive and physical competency that does not belong to any single sport. Spatial intelligence. Movement efficiency. Anticipation. Partnership dynamics. The ability to read a situation before it becomes obvious.
These are not football skills or padel skills. They are human skills, developed in one context and available for transfer to any context that rewards them. Football builds them at scale, across years, through the kind of variable, unpredictable environment that contextual interference theory identifies as the most fertile ground for transferable learning. The player who steps onto a padel court for the first time and finds themselves already reading it is not discovering a talent for padel. They are discovering that football gave them something more transferable than they knew.
The court is new. The brain has been here before.
misterillahi•Jun 10, 2026 
