A little more on “parity”
For those who didn’t wade into the comments on that last post, we got into the numbers a little more. In the past ten years, if Mark is to be believed (and I see no reason not to), every single NFL team has made the playoffs, making it reasonable to argue that every single NFL team has had a chance to win the Super Bowl in the last decade. This morning I went through the last ten years of MLB playoffs and discovered that 23 of 30 MLB teams have been in the playoffs in the last decade,* which means that 77% or so of all the teams in Major League Baseball have had a legitimate shot at winning the World Series. (I still don’t think it makes much sense to consider the NBA in this context, since half of all the teams make it into the playoffs and it’s kind of silly to say that a team with a sub-.500 record has a “legitimate shot at winning the NBA Finals: Even the Clippers have made it into the playoffs at least once in the last decade.)
Compare that to the Premiership, where there are literally four teams that have a shot at winning the league in any given year. If we define “parity” as the likelihood that any given team in any given year can win the title, then there’s really no comparison to be made. I don’t think this point is particularly contentious.
The only way to argue that the Premiership has anything approaching “parity” is to define the term another way, which is what I think Nav was trying to do. But I don’t really understand this other definition…that there’s parity in the Premiership because a variety of teams finish 4th through 8th?
The question now becomes why is there such a disparity in parity? As I suggested to JL, I think the answer is structural: American professional sports leagues are, by design, structured in a way that allows any team a realistic shot at winning in any given year (or any given ten-year period). Salary caps, playoff systems, income redistribution: These things all lead to a degree of parity that the European soccer teams simply don’t have.
*(The Yankees, Rangers, Red Sox, Indians, Mariners, White Sox, Athletics, Twins, Angels, Tigers, and Rays in the AL; the Braves, Astros, Mets, Diamondbacks, Cardinals, Giants, Cubs, Marlins, Dodgers, Rockies, Phillies, and Brewers in the NL.)