Today in the FA Cup, a nationwide tournament involving all soccer clubs, big and small, across England, Oldham Athletic upset mighty Liverpool. Oldham is having a bad season in League 1, which is actually the third tier of English football. Think “AA” if it were baseball. Liverpool is one of the most storied clubs not only in Europe, but also in the world. And they were bumped off by meager Oldham, who now gets to the final 16 of this enormous tournament.
If you are a comprehensive sports fan, like I am, then obviously, this sort of environment reminds you of the NCAA basketball tournament, which, to me, is better than Christmas. Tournaments are exciting. This is why every sport has them. They don’t really do much but thrill everyone who watches them. People assail NCAA football because it doesn’t have one.
But there’s the rub. The NCAA wants to crown the best football team in the land. Surely nobody believes that Oldham is one of the best 16 teams in England because they are one of the surviving team in this tournament. The other tournament, the League Cup, features Bradford, a team at a lower tier than Oldham, facing Swansea in the Championship. Surely nobody believes either of those teams are the best in England either.
No, it’s pretty well established that the team that wins the Premier League is the best team in England in that season. I’m not saying that this is a format that should come to the United States in any particular sport, but I think it is the best overall format of any sport in the world. You get the thrilling upsets of a tournament, but at the same time, the best team in the land is regarded as such.
This post sort of went off the rails early. Sorry. The moral of the story is, upsets are a heck of a lot of fun.
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