Original Script
Winning. It’s why we’re here. It’s why we keep coming back, and boy is it easy to keep coming back if you’re winning. Life at the top of the KPB rankings gives you and your fellow nationals victory after victory after glorious, validating victory. The occasional defeat can be explained away - your goalkeeper’s ill, the pitch too wide, the opposition too rough - and before you know it you and your brethren are right back where they were. Winning.
Winning is what all these teams do. Cycle after cycle they win, and win and come back and win… right down to here, just outside the all-time top two-hundred, where that win percentage drops below fifty. These teams don’t quite get to win all the time, but still win more than they lose. Two hundred places on, we’re already at the point where losing takes up most of a team’s time, and then…
And then there’s the other 87%.
These are the teams that, more often than not, were defeated. Beaten. Overcome. Routed. They are teams that failed. They capitulated. They floundered. They forced me to pick up a thesaurus rather than utter the dreaded ‘L’ word.
They lost.
Yet even this episode of The Idiot Project, which is based around the theme of losers and losing, can’t bring itself to focus solely on these teams that saw more Ls than a Welsh scrabble set. We start the episode with a team that staunchly refused to lose.
We start with Aguazul.
Aguazul’s run in the late fifties is something we’ve touched on before. They won four World Cups. Seven teams have won at least that many titles, sure, but largely not in the modern era, displayed here in dark blue. World Cups since cycle 47 have had an average of 166 entrants. Prior to cycle 47, a typical qualifying tournament had just 86. Winning so much in so short a period if a much harder thing to do these days, yet Aguazul did just that.
Within these six cycles is the unprecedented three-peat, a one-off accomplishment that, honestly, I don’t think we’ll ever see again. Although eleven different teams have won two titles back-to-back, aside from Bedistan and Valanora none of them ever looked like adding a third the next cycle. Looking only at the more competitive modern era, no team has even come close.
Let’s look closer at how, exactly, Aguazul achieved this feat.
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Over the course of these three cycles, Aguazul suffered two losses. Two. From sixty-five games. And both of these games meant absolutely nothing. In this first loss it’s the final game of the qualifiers, they’re seventeen points clear at the top of the group and have no reason to give the game any respect whatsoever. The second loss is a dead-rubber against The Archregimancy in which we think Aguazul gave some game-time to some fringe players. This is denied by La Verdad which, given the newspaper’s general trustworthiness, all but confirms it. Either way, they were already through to the second round, and won the group regardless.
In researching Episode 4 we looked at this Aguazul run and we figured, yeah, this is almost definitely the greatest three-cycle run by any team in the history of the World Cup
Almost definitely.
So close to ‘definitely’ that I’m almost certain I don’t need to crunch the numbers and find out for sure whether, statistically, this can be called the greatest three-cycle run of all time.
Okay fine. Here’s the Sosimo Lissón Metric.
The Sosimo Lissón Metric is named after the Aguazul super-striker that was part of each of the nation’s four World Cup wins, as a fringe player in cycle 54 and as a line-leading super striker in World Cups 57, 58 and 59, scoring vital goals in the latter stages of each tournament. Definitive records of his goal scoring prowess are a little hard to come by, but over these 65 games we’re quite sure he scored over thirty goals. Nowhere near Val Kylx or Alan Belmore territory, sure, but on the plus side he’s nowhere near Val Kylx or Alan Belmore territory.
Sosimo’s mark was left most prominently in the place where goalscoring records can’t be padded: Penalty shoot-outs. The Aguazul side of this era were a frighteningly hard team to beat, and even if you matched them for 120 minutes it was 100% certain that Sosimo and friends would better you in the shoot-out. We’ve named the chart after him because he is the embodiment of absolutely refusing to lose. That and - fittingly for this episode - his name begins with an ‘L’.
The Sosimo Lisson metric works like this.
* We’re only interested in teams that played three cycles in a row at least once. Everyone else, we discard.
* For the teams remaining, we find their Games Played for every cycle and their Games Lost for every cycle.
* Then, we start to combine every batch of three World Cups.
* We take each blue number - total matches - and divide it by each red number - total losses.
* We discard everything except the highest number, leaving one “golden” era and its Sosimo Lisson Metric. Our postulate is that the higher this number is, the better the team over that era. ‘Better’, as always, means ‘didn’t lose’. The database contains qualifiers, finals matches and any Official Friendlies which were posted onto the scores thread. There are no ‘divide by zero’ errors, so we know that no team has ever managed to go undefeated for three cycles. It’s important to mention at this point that games that went to penalty shoot-outs are listed as ties, regardless of whether a team won or lost the match.
* In this graphic which we’ll use for knockout matches, we use green for wins and red for losses. The green field shows the team that progressed to the next round. If Sosimo Lisson hadn’t helped win this shoot-out, the number on the left would be red, and the one on the right green.
Only a fifth of all teams to have entered the World Cup are here. To even get on this list you need to have played three cycles in a row, so our friends from the Chronicles of Ridiculousness are nowhere to be found, although their wheelhouse of cycles 30 to 32 is represented at the very bottom, with a commendably game but ultimately doomed Tocapa bringing up the rear.
Let’s look at the teams that went two in a row, starting with Az-cz. Their greatest ever era actually doesn’t actually include their World Cup winning cycle 38 in which the side lost eight times in twenty-four games. It instead runs from cycles 35 to 37. 67 games, nine losses. Take the first number, divide it by the second and you get seven point four recurring - their Sosimo Lisson score. Is this a good score? Well it’s good enough for 97th overall, which is decent, but perhaps a few dozen lower than where you’d expect a back-to-back champion to be.
Most of the two-in-a-row champions are here, dotted around the top thirty, but interestingly Sosimo Lissón generally doesn’t consider their back-to-back eras to be their all-time best. Vilita’s greatest run isn’t in the current era, where they’ve won the World Cup three times, but instead the period in and around their first title. Audioslavia were at their strongest a few cycles after winning their only silverware, Sorthern Northland a few cycles before. Going further into the past, Brazillico’s double-era is well down the order largely through playing so few games over that time and Rejistania, who defined themselves by being difficult to beat and dominated cycles 12 to 18, are surprisingly low, their golden era coming during their more resolutely Karelan days in the early 20s.
So. Moment of truth time. Aguazul’s run between World Cups 57 and 59. Is it ‘almost definitely’ the greatest of all time?
No.
...because it’s not even the greatest Aguazul run of all-time. They played 22 games in their one-loss Cycle 56 and only 19 in their one-loss cycle 59, so the former receives the higher score.
So, is this the greatest three-cycle run in history? Could it be possible that there is a team that is more impressive, statistically, than this Aguazul team?
Have a look at the top five. Who’s missing? Who’s conspicuous by their absence? Whose theme music is that?
Aguazul’s golden generation played 68 games and lost twice for a total of 34 points. Between cycles 53 and 55, Valanora lost only twice in 70 games. 35 points. They are side-by-side in the centre of this scattergraph, with the score on the Y axis and the cycle along the X.
This Aguazul run, which I was absolutely sure was the greatest of all time, has fallen foul of the Untitled Elf Rule: In any metric, Valanora must be at - or near - the top.
And so… Erm… that’s the end of the video. I mean what, were you expecting an epic four minute synthwave montage? I’ve done one for Valanora before. There’s no reason to do another one here.
Here, for there to be an epic four minute synthwave montage, there’d have to be some kind of surprisingly dominant dark-horse, far far above every other team in history.
<Epic four-minute synthwave montage>
Notes/Trivia
- Working title: “The Sosimo Lissón Metric”
- The idea for this episode was born in Episode 4, Chapter 5, which included Kiryu-shi inflicting a rare loss on Aguazul in World Cup 61. I’d gone back and found out the last time Aguazul lost, and in the process discovered that they’d gone on a run of about 50 games with only one defeat.
- The idea for the Sosimo Lissón Metric came when I realised it was easier to count how many losses a team had suffered over X cycles than it would be to figure out what the longest lossless run ever was. Dividing games by losses makes for a more interestingly curved graph than, say, doing win-percentage over X cycles or something like that.
- I only really created the Sosimo Lissón Metric in order to do an epic 4-minute synthwave montage about Aguazul’s 57-59 side. When the data came back and put them behind Valanora, I groaned. And then I saw Schottia.
- Perturbator’s excellent album Dangerous Days has been used before on The Idiot Project. In Episode 1, Chapter 1, the Vilitan Zoom section is accompanied by the track Raw Power. The YouTube permissions for the album are pretty lax.
- The idea of using Humans Are Such Easy Prey over a montage of a team going on an epic run is… pretty much the *only* reason *any* of the above script was written. It just turned out I was doing it to Schottia rather than Aguazul.
- One of Valanora’s famous 40s sides would have had a Sosimo Lissón Metric score of about 50 (they missed a set of qualifiers due to hosting a tournament around then), but for the fact that the Idiot Project database includes any friendly matches that were posted in the official World Cup scores thread. They only lost one competitive match between cycles 40 and 42 (iirc). Their second loss was in a friendly. Either way, they’d still be comfortably behind Schottia.
In any case, Schottia’s team in the late 70s is worth covering. We looked at them from the other side in the Bonesea episode (E2C2) and it was nice to have them as the good guys. - On September 12th, the entire script for this video simply read ‘Aguazul Humans Are Such Easy Prey’. By September 14th it was exactly the same, only with Schottia instead of Aguazul, having done the research.
- The script was largely finished by September 29th. The video was largely done by mid October.
- Mriin’s take on this was that it was a really strong opening to the episode. Aside from some shakier moments (the Aguazul run is glossed over a little too quickly and the writing for this video isn’t the best) I’m inclined to agree. E5C1 is pretty slick.
(63’ Tamura 
); Kaba, Honda 
(13’) 
(84’), Lúthersdóttir 
