Guinness Premiership Playoff Final Twickenham
Why Have a Knockout to Decide the Champions of a League?
This week sees the final of the Guinness Premiership. In a few weeks, the Super 14 plays its final, the French Top 14 decides its champion this way and the Magners League is following suit next year. Why, when teams have been battering each other for eight months should this method be used to decide the winner?
This will be the fourth time that playoffs have decided the Guinness Premiership. Sale, league winners in 2006, also managed to win the playoffs to win the Premiership outright. Gloucester, however, topped the league in 2007 and 2008, but lost in the playoffs and despite gaining more league points than their rivals were not the English champions.
Australian Rules Football Grand Final
The blame for this system must lie with Australian Rules football. The concept of the Grand Final was introduced by the Victoria Football League in 1896. Collingwood and North Melbourne couldn’t be separated at the end of the regular season and a, ‘winner take all’, match was played to decide the champions. The following season, the round robin format produced a winner in the regular season but the crowds were so poor that, in 1898, play offs were introduced and it has remained a part of Australian Rules, (and other sports in Australia), ever since.
American sports also use the playoff system, but they have a valid reason for doing so. Their leagues are traditionally divided into separate geographically defined conferences, where teams don’t complete a full round robin schedule. This means that to find the best in the league, you need a pyramid structure culminating in the Superbowl or World Series.
The Super 14 can also be forgiven for finishing the season with a playoff. The competing teams from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand are separated by as much as 7,000 miles and 9 time zones. This makes a home and away schedule impractical and again, a playoff system is a fair way of righting any fixture imbalance.
In most of national rugby leagues worldwide, this is not the case. Teams play each other twice a season, everyone plays everyone home and away, there is no advantage from weak fixture lists, the best team in the league will finish top. Why then do all these leagues insist on having a playoff that lets a team who finished fourth over 20+ games become the champions by winning one?
Playoffs Increased Ticket Sales Numbers and Revenue
The reason for the introduction of the finals concept in the Guinness Premiership and next season in the Magners league is of course money. Both leagues suffer from disjointed fixture lists through the lack of a structured season and games played during the international weekends attract lower crowds due to the bigger games and the loss of star players.
The playoff route keeps more teams in the hunt for longer and attracts bigger crowds. Teams whose seasons would have been over by the beginning of March still have something to play for late into the season and therefore, get more spectators buying Guinness Premierhip tickets. Understandable as this is, it still doesn’t get over the fact that leagues are supposed to be about producing the best team over the course of a season, not over the course of single game.
The Celtic Cup
The Celtic league, in the days before they adopted their current sponsor’s name might have had the right idea. In the 2004-2005 season, the top eight finishers in the league gained entry into the Celtic Cup, a knockout competition in its own right.
The competition was short-lived and with eight teams, probably too big, but at least the winners of the league could rightfully call themselves the champions. Will Leicester be able to say the same on Sunday?
Leicester v Bath Guinness Premiership Semi Final
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