What's your intention, the best team should always win? You would ruin football, that's the magic of it.

That unironically is the opinion of many people.

It comes up again and again, and is a culture clash that is not limited to but particularly prevalent between US and European perspectives.

US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series".

All of that is designed to maximise the chance that the "winner" and the "best team" are aligned.

Meanwhile in UK competitions, an entire yearly competition can be decided by a bad 90 minutes, such as ManU losing to York City, something the fans of both sides likely still remember 30 or so years later.

This argument frequently plays out in e-sports, which still try to find a good balance between the two, with the "best players should win" crowd wanting anti-climatic double-elimination, and the "Let's have more meaningful games" crown preferring single elimination.

"Competitions should be designed to find who the best team is" is a statement that many would agree with, but "Competitions should provide excitement and allow for upsets" is one I think is just as important, if not more so.

Another similar culture-clash is the concept of relegation versus franchising, as well as the concept of "drafting" in a (failed?) attempt to even out the competition.

	▲	Certhas 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would argue that salary caps + drafts are very successful at evening out the competition. European football leagues have come to be dominated by very, very few clubs. Bayern, Barca and Real, PSG, to a lesser degree Manchester City, have been absolutely dominant in their domestic leagues. In the case of Bayern winning 15 of the last 20, and 12 of the last 13 titles. PSG has won 11/13 most recent titles. In the meantime the NBA has had 7 different champions the last 7 years.
	▲	rkangel 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series". Except if you look at the NFL - the most popular sport in the US by far - the playoffs are "Best of 1". The NFL also enforces very close parity which gives a lot of unpredictability. You combine those and you get a lot of upsets.
	▲	philwelch 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think regular seasons are actually better mechanisms for discovering the best team because playoffs always suffer from low sample size. A bad 90 minutes is enough to ruin more than one playoff round in the NFL and probably enough to make the difference in the NBA as well. Playoffs are better optimized for drama.
	▲	Rotoke 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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