Sounder At Heart: How Much Parity Is Too Much Parity?

We Americans may like to think we believe it capitalist ideals, but when it comes to sports, we are really just a bunch of socialists.

We’ve created all kinds of drafts, salary caps and playoffs to ensure that the most teams have the most chances to win. Maybe not this year, but our sports teams are rarely doomed to be bad for more than a few seasons.

The NFL is often held up as the paragon of this ideal. Nine different teams have won the past 12 Super Bowls. In the 44 years the game has been played, 18 different teams have won it and 28 different teams have at least made it that far.

By contrast, the EPL has crowned a grand total of four different champions in the league’s modern 18-year history and hasn’t crowned a first-time champion since Nottingham Forest in 1977-78.

In its 15-year history, the MLS has taken parity to new heights. Nine different teams have won the championship and 12 of the existing 16 teams have played for it at least once.

Sounder at Heart’s Sidereal took an even closer look at this phenomena and found what amounts to almost total randomness.

A franchise parity of .904 is very close to totally uncorrelated, meaning that the previous season’s point total has almost no bearing on this season’s point total.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean results within a give season are totally unpredictable (he’ll be tackling that issue in later posts), but it does suggest a certain lack of predictability.

It’s my sense that as devoted as we may be to the belief that every team has a chance to win when the season starts, we’d also like to believe teams ultimately control their own fortunes. Good moves should be rewarded. Bad moves should be punished.

It will be interesting to see what kind of results Sidereal finds, as my own reading of the trends suggests the league is starting to move away from this kind of in-season randomness.