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The English Premier League kicked off last weekend, and along with the excitement from local fans pumped up for a new season of EPL football, it usually also initiates a debate around which system of deciding a competition’s champion is the best and fairest.
My EPL loving friends claim that the NRL and AFL should adopt a system that anoints the team that finishes on top of the ladder at the end of the season as the premiers.
Or, if Australians have an insatiable desire for a grand final to decide who the victors are, then the top 2 teams on the ladder should play-off for the premiership.
Personally, I think abolishing the NRL and AFL finals to simply have the team ‘first past the post’ declared as the winner, or having the top 2 teams play off for the grand final, is a completely unnecessary change.
Whilst I entirely understand that a team should be rewarded for its consistency throughout the season, I believe the outright premiership is too big of a reward for that consistency. Home ground advantage and a ‘second bite at the cherry’, should you lose in the first week, are ample rewards for the minor premiers.
The additional qualities of ‘mental toughness’ and ‘performance under pressure’ should also be inherent in the team that takes home the silverware. A ‘first past the post’ premier has significantly less opportunity to demonstrate if they have these equally important qualities, as there is less pressure associated with winning a competition when you simply have to win more games than your competitors, rather than winning the important, pressure filled games.
For the basis of my argument, I’ll use the NRL as an example.
Beating the Gold Coast Titans in front of 10,000 fans doesn’t carry the same pressure as beating the Melbourne Storm in a grand final, in front of 90,000 people, with a massive TV audience, a whole week’s build up, and increased media intensity.
No one can argue that a team that merely finishes on top of the ladder is subjected to the same level of pressure as a team that wins the NRL finals.
A true premiership team proves consistent enough over 26 rounds during the season to secure a high finals seeding, and then utilises that advantage to win three or four high pressured, high intensity, win-or-go-home games, and thus be crowned the king of the competition.
Pressure is what I love about finals football. And the ability to handle pressure is what makes a true champion.
But having said that, it’s purely a subjective point of view. Some fans would prefer to award the most consistent team, others would prefer to award the team that plays well at the most pressure filled time of year.
So opinion aside, is there a rational argument on why finals football is a better system of deciding the NRL premiership than the EPL’s system? I think there a few variables to consider.
Length of season
First of all, I’m not deriding the EPL, so football fans should save their vitriol for just a second.
Every EPL team plays 38 games a season. NRL clubs by comparison, only play 24 games, making it a significantly lower sample to ascertain who the best team is. Because EPL clubs play considerably more games, consistency is rightfully the barometer by which teams are measured. A three game losing streak is not pleasant for an EPL team, but you have plenty of time to bounce back. Lose three games in a row in a 24 game ‘first past the post’ season, and your season is practically over.
Equality of the schedule
Every EPL club plays each other an equal amount of times (home and away), whilst the NRL clubs do not, thus making any claims for the minor premier to be the undisputed best side, inherently flawed. Imagine if a team was anointed the premiers, but only had to play Melbourne and Manly once. It would be extremely hard to argue they were the best team in the competition.
Considering that rugby league is a contact sport, the demands of the game dictate that you can’t extend the season to ensure every team plays each other an equal amount of times. Do so, and the injuries will start to pile up, and fatigue will play too important a role.
Impact of injuries
Speaking of injuries, if the NRL moved to a ‘first past the post’ system, you can kiss your season goodbye if you lose your star player for a month – extremely likely considering the physicality of the game. A team could be the best all year, apart from the month when they lost their best player, yet miss out on a chance to win the premiership simply because they finished 3rd.
The representative season
Additionally, it’s not just injuries that prevent you from putting your best team on the park. The top teams in the NRL lose their best players during the representative part of the season, as the ‘Origin drain’ takes effect. As such, you can’t have the premiership decided by the team that finishes first on the ladder, because for 6 weeks the best teams are heavily disadvantaged by not having their best team on the paddock, thus restricting their ability to finish higher on the ladder.
The ‘myth’ of luck
Luck is a quality, though intangible, that most premiers require. One of the biggest criticisms of finals football is that a team can just get ‘lucky’ during the finals. But that’s not exactly accurate. First of all, you still need to qualify for the top 8, which requires a certain amount of consistency in the first place. Secondly, the notion that teams can just ‘get hot’ when it matters and win the premiership is a myth.
Since the NRL’s first season in 1998, there has only been one real underdog winner, Wests Tigers in 2005. But even their ‘underdog’ status is something of historical inaccuracy.
Everyone likes to remember the Tigers as simply getting on a roll in the finals, but they went on a run well before the finals started. It’s not like they were a rank outsider – they finished 4th on the ladder.
In fact, in 13 seasons of NRL action, no premiership team has finished lower than 4th on the ladder during the regular season. Following is the list of premiers and where they finished on the table that particular year:
1998: Brisbane Broncos – 1st
1999: Melbourne Storm – 3rd
2000: Brisbane Broncos – 1st
2001: Newcastle Knights – 3rd
2002: Sydney Roosters – 4th
2003: Penrith Panthers – 1st
2004: Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs – 1st
2005: Wests Tigers – 4th
2006: Brisbane Broncos – 3rd
2007: Melbourne Storm – 1st (stripped of both titles for salary cap cheating)
2008: Manly Sea Eagles – 2nd
2009: Melbourne finished – 4th (stripped of premiership for salary cap cheating)
2010: St George Illawarra Dragons- 1st
It’s also worth noting that many of the above teams that didn’t win the minor premiership were only a few points off doing so.
Therefore, the notion that teams have simply gotten ‘hot’ in the finals and won the premiership over a more deserving side is a complete falsehood. As the list illustrates, every premiership side has finished in the top 4, proving that consistency throughout the season plays an integral role in being the champion club come October.
And when it comes to luck, it’s not confined to the finals anyway. A team can receive just as much vitally influential luck during the regular season, either via a favourable game-deciding referee decision, or by not losing any players to injuries.
Maintaining interest
There are still three rounds to go in the NRL season, yet with the third placed Broncos sitting 6 points behind ladder leaders Melbourne, under an EPL-style system, the premiers and/or grand finalists would have already been decided. That’s what I call ending the season on a whimper, rather than a bang.
A ‘first past the post’, or ‘top 2 grand final’, essentially finishes the season very early for the majority clubs, which translates into losing the interest of the fans. Which means you lose ratings, crowds and revenue. Or in other words, you kill the competition.
And that’s without even calculating in the extreme negative impact not holding a finals series would have on the sport. Finals games are generally sell outs, rate the highest on TV, and generate the most media interest. I therefore struggle to see the logic in removing them.
Status quo
Hopefully the Independent Commission will fix many of the things currently wrong with the NRL.
But, quite simply, finals football isn’t one of them.
You can follow Ryan O’Connell on Twitter @RyanOak