Why the EFL Championship Playoff Is the Best Event in Sports

Analysis by Michael Lopez, now senior director of football data and analytics at the National Football League, found that the best team advances from a best-of-seven NBA series around 80% of the time. On the other end of the fairness spectrum, you've got baseball: a 162-game regular season and then playoff series that would need to be best-of-75 to identify the best team as often as the NBA's playoffs do. (View Highlight)

Both of those leagues struggle with devaluing the regular season, though that isn't the Premier League's problem. The structure of a typical European domestic league is about as fair as it gets: everyone plays the same schedule, and whoever comes out with the most overall points is the champ. Week 2 matters as much as Week 32, but when one team is much better than the others -- which is inevitable given the unequal spending power across these leagues -- you often get a situation like the one we'll see this Sunday, where the final games of the season are also the least important. (View Highlight)

While the MLB playoffs are wildly exciting, they're also wildly divorced from what happens in the regular season. Last season, for example, the Los Angeles Dodgers won 111 games -- the fifth most in league history -- while the San Diego Padres won 89. In years past, the Padres wouldn't have made the playoffs, but a recent expansion of the tournament from eight to 10 to 12 teams meant they snuck in. Then, in the second round of the playoffs, they beat the Dodgers in a best-of-five series 3-1. So who was really the better team? (View Highlight)

Of course, no sports league is designed solely to determine the best team. There needs to be a large degree of inherent uncertainty in the tournament structure to make it interesting for fans to watch, but also not so much uncertainty that fans feel like they're just watching world-class athletes flip a coin. (View Highlight)

While all of the major American leagues have increased uncertainty over time by adding more and more teams to the playoffs, European soccer has moved in the other direction. Not only have these leagues mainly stuck with competition models that were devised 100 years ago, but while American sports have closed-off cartel models that increase parity (and limit player wages), European soccer has embraced the free market with open arms, falling prey to the same inequality-increasing dynamics that are affecting everything else in the world. (View Highlight)

What you're left with is a fairness-emphasizing competition structure combined with an unfair financial landscape. The result, typically, is the same (read: richest) teams winning each title and the final few weeks of the season offering little excitement. (View Highlight)

However, unlike in those top European leagues, spending doesn't correlate as tightly with success. The correlation between spending and results in the Premier League is 80%, per Twenty First Group. But in the Championship, it's just 54%. This makes for a much more interesting competition. (View Highlight)