Original Script
This is a nice graph. Let’s invert it.
The Inverted Sosimo Lisson Metric shows every team’s *worst* three-cycle era. We’ve divided it into three sections to account for a general theme: Most nations experience their worst run in the cycles immediately after their debut. We’ve put those teams in orange. This is the norm. Most teams are at their weakest in their debut cycles. Polar Islandstates, Baker Park, Anglatia and Bonesea were all pretty strong right off the bat, while Crosshill and Al-Quds are two early champions whose worst three cycles are also their *only* three cycles.
Next, the yellows. The worst run of these yellow teams wasn’t in their very first cycle, but instead immediately after a hiatus. Royal Kingdom of Quebec had entered World Cup 59 before becoming a regular fixture from cycle 62 onwards. All of these teams are the type to leave and come back again. In their worst era they are all starting a comeback of at least three cycles, with Recuecn at the top of this merry band, qualifying via the playoffs on their cycle 83 return after having entered only two other World Cups previously - Editions 72 and 73.
The teams in blue are the most interesting group. These are the sides whose weakest trio of cycles came in the *middle* of an extended run. They’d played a few consecutive cycles, established themselves at a certain level, and then somehow... got worse.
The way multiversal football works… that’s kind of a strange thing to do. As a result, a lot of these *nations* are pretty strange. It’s like a who’s-who of meme-teams. Here’s the incomparable Lymantatia next to the timeless Lovisa, above dearly missed Maklohi Vai and The Weegies - and here’s the perennially unlucky San Regada sitting two spots above The Belmore Family
At the top: Mriin. But why?
In Mriin’s first three cycles, the Reavers lost only eleven games, mainly in qualifiers. From World Cups 83 to 85, they lost only nine, largely in the finals. The key is that they played 58 times in that first period, but only 45 in the second. Hosting the World Cup may adversely affect your Sosimo Lisson prospects if you lose and go out early.
Let’s sort these teams by value as opposed to type. Here’s Valanora. They’re first. *FOUR HUNDRED AND FIRST*
<air horns, hitmarkers etc>
Seriously though. The Untitled Elf Game. I win a point.
At the very bottom, Tocapa have company in the form of Hemas, San Verdi and Olastor, who round out the list as the nations who had the losingest eras of all time. For most of these teams, their worst cycle is their first cycle. It stands to reason. But this chapter isn’t about them.
When The Idiot Project covers the subject of *losing*, we’re not interested in teams that lost mere football matches. Losing, as a concept, as an artform, is much deeper and much more nuanced than that. Yes. I am gatekeeping defeat.
You may call me a hipster, to which I offer the following riposte: It’s impossible to listen to seventies Japanese jazz while watching a video about the statistics of three thousand imaginary football teams *before it’s cool*.
Losing comes in six flavours. Vanilla, Logical, Romantic, Hyperesthetic, Hypoesthetic and Cheese.
Tocapa and the like are examples of vanilla losing. Bad teams doing bad football things and getting bad results. They lost, and they know they lost, and that’s fine.
Closely related to Vanilla Losing is Hypoesthetic Losing, which is a ten dollar way of saying a team lost, but didn’t feel anything when it happened. The teams from the chronicles of ridiculousness? Most of them lost football matches that they weren’t paying attention to anyway. Their national football team left the country and got schooled but their nation’s media never mentioned anything about it. The team came back and never told anyone they’d been an international footballer for five minutes. It’d be like trying to tell your friends that you were once an internationally recognised fridge magnet thrower. People don’t know what that is and telling them about your exploits is just going to make them confused and angry.
So far, so uncontroversial. Here’s the third type of loser. Hyperesthetic.
What would be most painful, the feeling of being poked by a few dozen sewing needles or the feeling of being run through a broadsword? You can go and experiment. I’ll wait.
Did you go for option A? Honestly that’s what I’d have gone for as well. This is the method used by Tocapa, DJ8989 and the like. Lose often, shrug it off, continue your day. That’s not the case for Hyperesthetic losers.
For any international football team that demands nothing less than continued, perpetual, uninterrupted success. losses happen with a frequency of maybe once per year. It’s a defeat in a major final or the latter stages of an international football tournament and it *hurts*. It’s a missed opportunity. It represents a chance for your rivals to close or extend the gap between them and you. These teams may not feel defeat very often, but when they *do* feel it, it’s a pure, refined, intense pain that most people simply don’t experience. They’re not big losers, but when they lose, it’s big.
A close relative of Hyperesthetic Losing is Romantic flavour Losing. This is Hollywood Losing. It’s beloved Polarian Alexander Van Sorenson leaving everything on the field in straining to arrest his nation’s run of World Cup Final defeats, and failing. It’s The Babbage Islands getting closer and closer to the finish line but never quite making it. It’s a relative of Hyperesthetic losing but, really, it’s the opposite. Whereas Hyperesthetic Losers live in constant fear of the broadsword, for these teams, there is always the feeling that, for them, the end of the story is yet to happen. There’s always hope.
Cheese flavour losing is the type experienced by one-off puppet nations dipping a toe into international football. That just leaves us with one. Logical Losing.
Is it the opposite of Romantic Losing? Yes and no. Yes, there is nothing romantic about Logical Losing but no, it’s not named as such in an attempt to position it as the opposite of Romantic Losing.
Logical losing isn’t named after its attributes. Logical losing is named after a football team.
Very few people would ever call Rohan Cammers ‘statuesque’ - unless there’s been a recent drive in the sculptological community towards chiselling scrawny arseholes out of coprolite - but as he stands and stares and scowls and stares, unblinking and unwavering, at his Audioslavia side lining up defend a last-minute Kalactinian corner, there’s precious few other ways to describe him.
Larry Martinez, a player Rohan knows all to well from his days in Audioslavian domestic football, whips the cross into the box. Jimmy McCarthy is there, but gets underneath the header, which loops into the arms of Goran Stroud.
Suddenly, the statue steps forward and roars unintelligibly in the general direction of Goran Stroud.
“Fackafuggingeddifackinapthepitchyafuggincantye”
Goran Stroud duly gets it up the pitch with one heave of his right arm. Eurico Da Rosa, the substitute, runs onto the ball as it bounces up the line and flails at it before Joseph Anderson can intercept. The ball squirms away and into Erwin Spijkers’s path, who knocks the ball far ahead of him down the wing, getting his head down, entering sprint-mode, and beating Kalactinian Matt Hall to the ball. He takes one more touch, taking the ball to the corner of the 18 yard-box, before playing the ball into the space he assumes Koenraad Rijsbergen will be arriving in shortly, having seen him from the corner of his eye moments earlier. Two Kalactinians are desperately running back to cover, and Rijsbergen isn’t the fastest player in the world, but he *is* a strong one. He leans into the challenge to his left as a shield, waits for the ball to arrive at his feet, and swipes at it. It’s not a clean shot, but it’s the spooniness of it that bamboozles the onrushing Mark Romero, who flails despairingly as the ball arcs out of his reach and loops awkardly into the far corner for 4-3, right at the death.
Koenraad hears a roar from his own bench. It sounds very much like “Fackinavafugginbiddathatyafackinbell”, which is a phrase Rohan Cammers has become fond of saying.
Audioslavia, who had only won one qualifying group since their World Cup 80 return to international football, finally, were in the driving seat. 5 or 7 points from their two remaining home games would be enough to at least make the playoffs.