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ABSTRACT
How should sport deal with prematurely ended seasons? This question is especially relevant to the current COVID-19 interruption that threatens to leave many leagues without champions. We argue that although there can be no winners, in certain situations there should be champions. Relevant to the current situation, we argue that Liverpool FC—currently with a 22+ point lead—should be crowned champions of the English Premier League. However, things are not as simple as simply handing the championship to whoever was in the lead when a season is prematurely ended. Through analogy with a fictional decathlon competition—and with the understanding that sporting seasons are themselves a type of game—we identify three reasons why leading at the moment of cessation is insufficient to be crowned a victor (of an individual event) or a champion (of a season-long competition): doing so fails to respect some valuable skills, fails to allow for luck to play out in an interesting way that affects competitions, and fails to respect competitive strategies. This discussion can then inform determining what, if any, end-of-season accolades are relevant, such as championships, relegation, or promotion. No team can win in a league that has failed to be completed, but there can still be a champion.
Acknowledgments
Alex Wolf-Root is thankful that his PhD advisor, Alastair Norcross, roots against Liverpool, as it made writing this paper more enjoyable. Jake Wojtowicz is thankful that his devotion to Paul Scholes should shield him from any allegations that he is a biassed Liverpool fan. Both are thankful to Sports, Ethics and Philosophy editor Andrew Edgar for his very prompt and helpful feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For a nice discussion (with a less nice result for football fans) about the distinction between time-regulated and event-regulated games, see Kretchmar (Citation2005).
2. In rugby, and also in the MLS, the team at the foot of the table gets the wooden spoon.
3. The decathlon consists of 10 events each separated by at least 30 minutes and completed over two days. Each event is scored independently, with the winner of the decathlon being the person who has the most total points after the tenth event. Events on the first day are the 100 m, Long Jump, Shot Put, High Jump, and 400 m. Events on the second day are the 110 m hurdles, Discus Throw, Pole Vault, Javelin Throw, and 1,500 m.
4. At the league level, Leicester City, in the 2014–15 season, had been bottom of the Premier League table for over four months, but they won seven of their final nine league games, having won only four of their first thirty-one games, to ensure survival. (The next season they went on to an even more remarkable feat: they won the Premier League.)
5. In fact, Williams’s distinction is more complicated, since there can be cases of luck intrinsic to a project that are not ‘determined by’ the agent (26). For instance, there’s the bad luck of a competitor having an excellent day. We do not need to get into this.
6. Depending on circumstances, there might be goals other than simply to win this game which would lead to different skills or tactics that are significantly different from the skills used in the first 87 minutes. For instance, the losing manager might send the center back up front or push the wingers right up. Regardless of this, these skills or tactics wouldn’t make a difference to the result. A manager might try to get a late goal, but unless he is trying to improve his team’s goal difference, the value is merely the expressive value of showing that they won’t entirely give up: massively out-performed teams do not go on to win or draw with three minutes left when they are three goals down.
7. Of course, there will be borderline cases, and we cannot give a formula for working these out (though see the below discussion of the purist fan). Nonetheless, it should be clear that sometimes the losing team has no chance of victory. Perhaps a team trailing 3–0 after 79 minutes still has a chance of catching up so no victor should be declared, but not so if they’ve been thoroughly outplayed and are 6–0 down at that time (see Brazil v Germany in the 2014 World Cup).
8. At the time the season was paused, Liverpool had played one game more than Manchester City. Had City won this extra game, Liverpool would have a lead of 22 points, with 27 left to gain; Liverpool have only dropped 4 points in 29 games, and—if the season resumes—they would have to drop 23 in 9 games for City to even have a chance of winning the league.
9. Note, this does not apply to the entire Premier League. There are genuine competitions, and the chance for genuinely valuable skills being exhibited, at other levels: in the chase for the Champions League, in the relegation scrap, and so on. But it does suggest to us that if the season must be abandoned, it would be legitimate to crown Liverpool champions, no matter what we do with the other positions.
10. For a brief overview, an excellent podcast episode is Golazzo: The Totally Italian Football Show ‘The notorious Moggi’.
11. If, despite our championship-caliber argumentation here, league officials fail to apply our lessons and don’t actually award the title when the purist fan would judge a team to be the champion, the team should nonetheless be viewed and celebrated as the champion in all matters of fan prestige and appreciation.
12. Unless as some allege, Inter Milan also engaged in illegitimate behavior.
13. The question of season-end prize money depends on more than just the considerations here. Given the worldwide pandemic, there are good reasons to drastically reduce the money spent on professional sport to better fund global health, but such a discussion is far outside the scope of this paper.