The Idiot Project - A YouTube RP

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Four, Chapter Seven [10:04]

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Four, Chapter Eight [11:46]

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Four, Chapter Nine [11:46]

[The Idiot Project]

Christmas Special 2020 [15:55]

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Five, Chapter One [19:02]

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. 

—-

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.

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Five, Chapter Two [11:09]

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.

Extras
The Sosimo Lissón Chart
The Inverted Sosimo Lissón Chart (sorted by type)
The Inverted Sosimo Lissón Chart (sorted by score)

Please note: In the inverted chart, having a high score / longer bar is a *good* thing. It means your worst ever cycle is better than other teams’ worst ever cycle.

Notes/Trivia]

• Working title: “Everybody Takes a Beating Sometime”
• The original version of this script was done by around the 1st of October (see below), but was overhauled around October 30th
• Yes, there was a montageparody/airhorns/hitmarkers section in the middle of this video for the ‘Valanora aren’t in the top five give me my Untitled Elf Game points’ section, but it ended up looking fucking dreadful.
• This is probably the weakest video of the run. Its entire purpose is to get us from Aguazul to Eastfield Lodge while also getting us back on track with regards to the overall message of the episode. That message basically boils down to ‘losing is good. Own your losses’
  Update: This ended up not being the message of the episode. I couldn’t write it without sounding sanctimonious.
• The ‘before it’s cool’ line is the second best line of the episode. The best one comes in chapter 6.
  Update: That best line ended up getting cut
• The decision to use 70s/80s Japanese Jazz is related to two things. First: Episode 4 used a lot of Vaporwave, which often samples 70s and 80s Japanese City Pop. Secondly, a lot of these albums are deleted or just plain not available on Spotify, and therefore not monetized on YouTube, so I don’t get copyright struck when I use them.
• Indigo Jam Unit aren’t from the 70s, they’re fairly recent. Again, though, they aren’t on Spotify. That probably isn’t supposed to mean I can just use whatever of their songs I want, but hey. I use about four of their tracks over this episode. They’re great.
• The original version of this script was really sanctimonious and preachy and kind of depressing. I include it below in full.

Scrapped Script
These charts are pretty to look at, but we no longer have any use for the Sosimo Lisson Metric. This isn’t an episode about the greatest eras of these teams. This episode is about their losingest eras. For that, we’re going to need to invert our chart.

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. They make up the overwhelming majority of these teams. At the top, nations who did well in their debut and never took a backwards step. Polar Islandstates, Baker Park, Anglatia and Bonesea. Crosshill and Al-Quds are two early champions whose worst three cycles are also their *only* three cycles.

— script follows the finalized version until just after the Mriin bit —

Valanora being second on that graph isn’t enough for me to score a point in the Untitled Elf Game, but this reversed graph totally works. Taking all three colours together, Valanora are 401st overall, their opening three cycles worse than average for teams that stuck around for more than two editions of the World Cup. The only team above them on that first chart, Schottia, are a good 200 places below them on the second. Schottia’s unbeatable era came fewer than ten cycles after their ‘very damned beatable’ era, with twenty-five losses coming over the course of just forty-four games. At the very bottom, Tocapa’s three-cycle run may have been worse than everyone else’s best, but not everyone else’s worst. Here. Let me introduce you to Olastor.

What Olastor did better than most other teams isn’t simply to lose - there are plenty of single-serving nations who have done that more spectacularly - but to lose and come back again. Time and time again, as if losing was what they *wanted* out of football. In their greatest cycle, World Cup 82, they lost only four times in eighteen games - that’s less than half as many losses as their previous cycle and a third as many as the one prior to that. What did they do with this form? They tossed it in the bin. They refused to enter the next World Cup, coming back only for World Cup 85 where they lost seventeen of twenty-four games to finish dead last in Group 9, fifty-four whole points behind first and six points behind the heady heights of 12th.

Olastor’s win percentage in World Cup games, in total, is a little under 23%. When their fans go to see them play, there’s a 60% chance that they’ll see their country get beat. They’ve lost 110 times in 184 games. Every time they put their name down for a World Cup they’re probably going to lose ten more at least. And yet they keep coming back. Their fans keep coming back. And that deserves respect.

It isn’t easy following a losing team. I mean you all know someone who supports a big club. They’re a fan of AFC Treason or Spartangrad or C.A. Paulinthal despite the fact they live in Drawkland or Darmen. They live a couple of miles from their local team but they’ve never seen play, but then they’ve never seen *tHeIr* team play except on TV. Why do they do it? Why pretend you’re a fan of a big team in a different country? Why not support your local team, in sixteenth place in the second tier in your own country? It’s simple, and it’s the same reason why a losing team will get fewer and fewer fans for as long as they keep losing.

Teams that don’t win disgust us. With every time they try - and fail - they commit a cardinal sin: They remind us of ourselves. They, like us, are not superheroes. They get outthought and outbattled and outplayed. We want to believe they’re capable of beating the best, and maybe they are on occasion, but it’s also true that a group of hack clodhoppers representing a tinpot footballing backwater can figure out a couple of things that can confound those players you desperately wanted to be the next incarnations of Sosimo Lissón. Your F.A.’s social media team had built your star player up to be a sexier, left-footed version of Thorsten Kramer, but after ninety minutes of flailing you realise he’s… just a guy. A guy who can’t get the job done. A guy like you.

Fans of bad, lossy teams are a weird breed. They’re masochists or hipsters or people who need a helping of anger or indignation to get through their day or just people who continue to cling onto hope long after everyone else has let go. They love water-cooler football talk every Monday, but can’t understand it when, every few weeks or so, their work colleagues tune out from the conversation and get antsy when you ask them about football. Their team of multi-millionaire mercenaries lost at the weekend. Now they’re suddenly into baseball. Fans who follow a big team always disown them in the days after a loss, but then... we all do. And that’s why we should all be grateful for those multiversal football teams that, week after week, year on year, decade upon decade keep showing up, and losing, and losing, and *losing*, and keep coming back again and again. Those teams that lose every week have more resolve, bravery and determination than any top-ranked side. They are the lifeblood of international football more so than any top team you can name. They are true heroes.

There is a heroism in losing. And when it comes to losing, no team in the multiverse, throughout the rich history of the World Cup, is more heroic than this team. The greatest of the bad teams. My personal heroes.

Eastfield Lodge.

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Five, Chapter Three [14:57]

Original Script
Eastfield Lodge are ten games World Cup 57 qualifiers and Eastfield Lodge, as usual, are languishing in mid table and going absolutely nowhere. There are six games left. They are eight points shy of the playoffs.

If a fightback is going to happen, it has to start now.

The Eastfielders move up to third, but they’re closer to second last than second place. Tretskivucia remain eight clear with five games left to play. Both teams have still to face Aguazul, who are thoroughly Aguazulling the group, and both teams have to face each other right now. It’s must win for Eastfield Lodge.

Awesome. Let’s see what Eastfield Lodge have to say about it….

...

Okay they’re probably happy but they’re not paying attention any more because that’s… that’s a lot of bodies.  This is EFL’s last roleplay of the thread so the team are going to be flying blind from here on out but that’s okay. This comeback is still possible. Tretskivucia have a bye-day, so a win for Eastfield Lodge is sure to close the gap, but they’ll need to keep winning, and they need Tretskivucia to drop further points.

Three points clear with one game left to play. Eastfield Lodge have to travel to Aguazul. Aguazul are unbeaten. Aguazul have scored eighteen goals in their last three games. Aguazul will go on to win this World Cup and the two after that. This is an impossible task… right?

Right. EFL have played their last game. They must now wait on Matchday 18. Tretskivucia have to get a point in their final game, but that game... is against Aguazul. Aguazul are unbeaten. Aguazul have scored twenty-one goals in their last four games. This should be an impossible task.

Should. We’ve already seen that it’s not.

In Chapter 1 we said this match meant nothing, but that was only true for Aguazul, not for Tretskivucia, and not for the Eastfielder population slumped on the couch, watching the TV with increasing disbelief. 

Aguazul were supposed to win. Aguazul always win. How could this happen? And when it comes to Eastfield Lodge, how could this happen over and over again?

Eastfield Lodge joined the football world in cycle 49, carrying with them arguably the worst flag in the history of the multiverse. They entered the same Baptism of Fire tournament that gave us Andrewboy, Osarius and an Oberour Ar Moro side that would beat the Eastfielders in the knockouts. The note at the top of this post probably didn’t seem quite so sarcastic back in 2009. Eastfield Lodge have generally not enjoyed further success in World Cup qualifying.

The yellow line here shows the Eastfielders’s goal difference throughout a qualifying campaign, including any friendly matches deemed ‘official’ by the World Cup Committee, but omitting playoffs or finals appearances. 

We’ve chosen goal-difference because it gives us a base: This faint black line with positive goal differential above it and negative below. 

Yellow zigzag above good, yellow zigzag below bad.

Here, we can see the Eastfielders’s slow start to the World Cup 57 qualifying campaign, with their goal differential in the negative. It drops further after their mid-qualifying exhibition game against Bears Armed, and rises again with a comprehensive friendly-match victory over Cyborg Holland. We see their late-campaign fightback as they charged back up the table, including their other destruction of Cyborg Holland - this one in the qualifiers - followed by defeat to Aguazul and three post-qualifying friendly matches. Two losses and a draw against Eura, Tamarindia and The Weegies. 

Eastfield Lodge were one of those weird teams that wore blue on the Inverted Sosimo Lissón Chart. They’re in a modest position just outside the top two-hundred. Their worst trio of cycles apparently 73 to 75. 

Cool let’s have a look at those cycles.

Okay. Not great but not terrible.

World Cup 73 qualifying, you don’t need me to tell you that’s a mid-table performance. Fourth in a group of seven, finishing with a goal difference of minus one. They may as well have not been there at all. 

World Cup 75 is almost exactly the same story, but about World Cup 74? This doesn’t seem so bad so far…

Qualifying group 19, four matchdays to go, here’s the situation in this alternative version of the table. Looking at the group four years on, it doesn’t seem particularly strong save for top-seeds Cosumar in the playoff spot. The auto-qualification spot belongs to Eastfield Lodge. 

They have a game in hand, they have seven wins from eight games. They’re flying.

Defeat away to Cosumar is nothing to be ashamed about. Five points ahead of Szavoda with only three games to play, all they need is four points from their three remaining fixtures in order to progress, and the first of them is a six-pointer against Szavoda. Victory here would put them into the playoffs at least. A draw would do just fine.

Okay. Not ideal. Two ahead with two to play, but the first of those two games is against Vaugania, who haven’t moved from zero points the entire campaign. 3-0. One game to go, two points the gap, and unlike the Tretskivucia situation, Eastfield Lodge’s fate is in their hands. A win here would seal that playoff spot. A draw would be fine as long as Szavoda don’t win. 

---

Eastfield Lodge are a master of the dark art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 

I mean look at this. This has to be a successful qualification run, right? I mean if it isn’t then this has to be one weird qualifying tournament…

World Cup 54 qualifying. The format: 17 groups of six… plus 13 groups of 5. Double round robin - so 10 games or 8 depending on your group. Top two progress to a secondary single round robin with ten groups of six, where the top three qualify for the World Cup. 

Not a typical qualifying format. It was a doomed one-off experiment and the only upside was that it provided Eastfield Lodge with the opportunity to fail in a new and exciting way.


The side strolled into first place in their group in stage one, went onto stage two, won their first two games, and just had to get through their final three matches without dropping too many points. A couple of draws or a single win should be enough here, and they’ve got three matches to do it in. You ready? 

One. 
Two. 
Three.

We’ve seen Eastfield Lodge capitulate spectacularly from a position of power.  We’ve seen them fight back into contention and get slapped back down by Margaret. Is this how Eastfield Lodge live their life? A succession of glorious, romantic failures at the final hurdle?

If only their existence was so exciting. Throughout their eleven-year history, spectacular failures are few and far between. Eastfield Lodge lead a purgatorial existence. We may associate them with losing, but losing accounts for only 30% of what they do. They’re not a football team that loses. I mean, life would be simpler if they were. There’s a stark, palpable certainty in a string of 4-0 defeats. Teams that finish bottom of the group know their place in the world. The Eastfielders’ meagre diet consists of 6-3-5 records and fourth place finishes, and it has been so since their inception.

Eastfield Lodge are not losers like DJ8989, losing meaninglessly,  to the utter indifference of the entire country.
They are not losers like The Babbage Islands, capitulating heartachingly on the grandest scale.
Eastfield Lodge are losers in the worst possible sense. They trudge endlessly through a grey fog, seeing nothing, touching nothing, signifying nothing. A paradox. Bewilderingly inconsistent, but crushingly, thuddingly predictable.  

They are connoisseurs of capitulation. They practice losing in its grandest and its most terrible form. 

But surely that can’t be all there is? Somewhere in that long history their fans must have had something - anything - to cheer about...

Notes/Trivia

• Working Title: “The Eastfield Logic”
• The script was largely finished by mid October. The video was mostly finished by early November.
• The first twenty seconds are among my favourite opening 20 seconds of all TIP videos. Entirely for the song.
• This EFL bit is very clearly influenced by Jon Bois’s series on the Seattle Mariners, which you should definitely watch. That runs to about 3 and a half hours. The Eastfield Lodge section here ends up at only 40 minutes.
• The final scene is pretty much stolen from the fourth video of that series. The bit that introduces Ichiro Suzuki.
• I have a list of about half a dozen NS Sporters who have told me they’d like to narrate a video and who I haven’t asked yet. I was going to choose one of them for this one, but after Nethers knocked E5C1 out of the park I was having trouble reading the script in anything but his voice, so eventually I asked him to do it.
• I had a chat with Nethers about his pronunciation of ‘bewilderingly’ and he decided he wanted that to be the IC pronunciation of the word according to Nethertopians. I like this.
• Whatever the previous record for 'amount of individual images used in a TIP video', this video broke it. By a lot.

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Five, Chapter Four [15:42]

Original Script
They say a sign of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You can’t levy that accusation at Eastfield Lodge. After the side capitulated so rottenly in the qualifiers for World Cup 54, they approached the next cycle with a very different look.

The Whoverse’s infiltration of Eastfield Lodge’s National Football Team may have been temporary, but it had a lasting effect in the form of one man. The Doctor. Clubless, ageless, nameless, with thighs far too skinny to be a professional footballer, The Doctor nevertheless became a fixture in the Eastfielder national team from cycle fifty-five to cycle eighty-three.

The Doctor’s impact was immediate.

Qualifying Group 14. Three games to go. Top two progress to the World Cup. Eastfield Lodge have never been to a World Cup. They are fourth. The teams above them - Rejistania, Unibot and The Holy Empire - have eight World Cups between them at time of writing. Nevertheless EFL are only three points back. This is do-able.

An away win over Invisible Wabbits keeps them in contention, but their nineteenth match will come against The Holy Empire, for whom a draw will be enough to qualify for the finals. Eastfield Lodge, though, need the win. Unibot and Rejistania both have home ties coming up against unfashionable opposition. They won’t both lose. EFL need to keep up the pace. Only a win will do.

0-0. The Holy Empire qualify. Let’s see how much ground EFL have lost to Rejistania and Unibot.

Huh. 

For once in their life, Margaret has done them a solid, but surely this is too little too late. Unibot will round out qualifying against Blasphematic Fools, Eastfield Lodge travel to Emagna needing not only a win, but for Unibot to lose or draw.

This is the point in qualifying where they capitulated last cycle, and where they will be cruelly denied by Aguazul,  Tretskivucia and Margaret in cycle 57. 

For once, fate is kind to the Eastfielders, and for the first time in history, Eastfield Lodge are going to the World. Cup. It’s their first ever ticket to the big dance. They don’t even need to get through to the knockout stages for this World Cup to be considered a success. Just three or four points and an increase in rank would do. They’re not playing to win the World Cup, they’re playing to position themselves for future World Cups. A few points would go a long way towards that.

They get zero.

Man. That boost to their KPBs would have been really useful too. For all The Doctor’s talents in manipulating space-time, for the next twenty cycles he will not be able to move Eastfield Lodge one inch.

<scroll through cycles 56-73>

The Eastfielders make some gains in the early seventies, but it’s not much. They’re ranked 81st in the world for cycle 70, and by the end of their supposed ‘worst ever era’ they’ve improved to 68th. Over this period they go from 11.21 KPB points to… 10.78. 

There’s a depressing logic to it. Eastfield Lodge are not a team that makes progress. They do not move. Everyone else shifts around them. 

So… we know what their worst ever run is. Cycles 73 to 75. What’s their best three-cycle run? Over their eleven years as a permanent fixture of the football world, what would be considered the golden generation of Eastfielder football? 

It’s the three cycles immediately after their worst generation.

This performance in World Cup 76 may not look particularly impressive but remember, Sosimo Lisson only cares about not losing, and EFL aren’t those kind of losers. It’s not winning often enough that bedevils them. Here, they lose only twice on the way to third place. 

By the time World Cup 77 gets underway, it has been 22 cycles since Eastfield Lodge played in the World Cup.

Notes/Trivia

• Originally, Logic II and Logic III were just one video, but it ran to 25 minutes. In cutting it in half I got to slow the pace a little, so we end up with a 15 minute video and a 13 minute one.
• The script was largely finished by late October, and the videos done by early November.

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Five, Chapter Five [12:47]

Original Script
The Eastfielders suffer just one defeat in twelve to top the group with six matchdays to go. You might think this is a weak group. It’s not. It’s really not.

The lead at the top is a slim one. If two of Brenecia, Anglatia or Turori get a run together and the Eastfielders don’t continue their fine form then they could very easily miss out on the World Cup again.  Eastfield’s final six games of qualifying will include matches against all three of these teams. At home to Brenecia on matchday fourteen, away to Turori on matchday fifteen, and a final-day showdown with Anglatia. Three six-pointers. All of which are not so much ‘must win’, but must not lose

The Eastfielders hold their nerve. They just about keep their heads above water, while all around them are losing theirs.

With two games to go, Brenecia are out after a horrendous run. The Brenecians and the Anglatians have different ideas of how to most accurately express their feelings.

Eastfield Lodge can’t quite finish the job against Mattijana, and Turori are allowed right back into the picture.

On the final matchday, Turori play a Kaisaru side who have lost fourteen of their seventeen games so far. Eastfield Lodge need to match Turori’s result to progress. If Turori draw, they need to draw. If Turori win, they need to win, and they need to do it against group leaders Anglatia, who themselves aren’t guaranteed qualification.

--

At last. A second World Cup. Last time out they lost all three games. In World Cup 77, they will improve. In the most minor way possible.

World Cup 78 largely passes Eastfield Lodge by as they struggle to fourth place in the group, and that’s the golden generation of Eastfielder football. Mediocre, surprisingly-good-and-then-mediocre, and mediocre. The Eastfieldiest of Eastfielder teams. 

Eastfield Lodge will never reach these heights again. Their best run since came in World Cup 81. They finished fourth in qualifying.  Since then, things have taken a definite turn for the worst.

This side, that represented Eastfield Lodge in cycles 76 to 78, goes down as Eastfield’s golden era. You may laugh. And if you’re laughing, then you’re missing the point entirely.


Over the course of eleven long years and almost forty World Cups, the universe has given Eastfield Lodge every possible sign that they should quit. Year upon year, cycle after cycle, they do not improve. They start each cycle where they began the last one, and the one before that. Average. Unremarkable. The very definition of an also-ran. 

Their weakness, though, is also their strength. It can be summed up in the mantra ‘If at first you don’t succeed, redefine success’. There are so many teams who exist like this. An accomplishment that may be taken for granted by your team - like qualification for a World Cup - gives fans of these teams more happiness than you could imagine. A winning team wins and feels relief. Their fans don’t feel joy, not truly, just that a score is settled, or a deal is done. A losing team wins and instead feels… happy. Truly, purely happy. A meeting of joyful surprise and the genuinely unexpected.

Losing, in any flavour, is something Eastfield Lodge have become immune to. Not the act - heaven knows they’ve become accustomed to that over the years - but the taste. Though they do not make progress, they do not exist without purpose. They exist for the same reason every football team exists. Entertainment, and the pride of seeing the colours of your home town, or home land, represented on a wider stage.

Anyone balking at the idea that Eastfield Lodge have a ‘golden generation’ is wrong to do so. And they’re wrong in more ways than one.

<CR win montage>

Notes/Trivia

• Small plot-hole: The Inverse Sosimo Lissón metric lists WCs 73-75 as Eastfield Lodge’s worst ever run when it’s plainly obvious from the yellow squiggles that cycles 84-86 were worse. The reason is this: The Sosimo Lisson data was processed before World Cup 86 ended. Cycles 84-86 are the Eastfielders’ worst. This was addressed in the script to Chapter 6, but that addendum ended up on the chopping room floor.
• Logic II and III are the first and last times I try using a game controller to scroll Google Earth. For Chapter 6 onwards I finally sat down and figured out Google Earth’s ‘paths’ function.
• Raven Cullen, who emma (age 5 and three quarters) is asking to die, was sacked by Brenecia, naturally, but immediately found work as manager of Anglatia. (Courtesy of Nephara)

[The Idiot Project]

Episode Five, Chapter Six [21:13]

I tried to write 20 minutes of material on Eastfield Lodge and ended up with more than double that and still, we didn’t even scratch the surface of what exactly an Eastfield Lodge *is*.

Take this guy for instance. The Doctor. Over three videos and forty-two minutes we barely learned a thing about him. Truly doing justice to his impact on Eastfield Lodge and the wider football world would take at least forty minutes more. He’d deserve every second, but still, there’s only so much time at my disposal.

The Doctor was famously clubless, but I will tell you about a special club that he does belong to. The Doctor is a member of the CL Club: A club I just made up. It has very specific entry requirements: To be part of the CL Club you must be a footballer that has lost at least 100 games of World Cup football, throughout the qualifiers and the finals. C for Century, L for Losers. To do this, you need to be part of a World Cup squad during a match they lost, whether or not you made it onto the field that day. If it seems unfair that you should take an L for sitting on the bench, then it shouldn’t. If a third-choice goalkeeper gets to put a winners’ medal on his mantlepiece after watching his side win the World Cup, then they also get to have a loss on their record whenever they watch their side get beat. You can’t have it both ways. A team that wins together, loses together.

It’s a little difficult to collate definitive statistics on this type of losing. Data about appearances isn’t so readily available. From the data we do have, and from a wee bit of guesswork, we estimate that The CL Club has 22 members.

As you might expect, a couple of these members are elven players who have joined the CL Club through longevity rather than incompetence. You’ve probably heard of them.

Valanora talisman Laborious Hawk has amassed an estimated 119 defeats between World Cups 34 and the present, and may add a few more before finally hanging up his boots. He’s the only Vanorian elf here, with the likes of Espy va Drake and Faeron Soldarian having retired a few defeats short of the mark.

Valrauncion may never have got anywhere near the one hundred mark himself had he not opportunistically switched allegiance from Starblaydia to Krytenia after World Cup 57 amid Starblaydia’s temporary withdrawal from international football. He managed 125 losses between winning World Cup 44 in his debut cycle and walking out on Krytenia during a failed attempt at qualifying for World Cup 82.

The numbers you see here are these players’ ages as listed in that cycle’s roster. Valrauncion’s switch from Starblaydia to Krytenia is shown via this change of colour, just before his 2,850th birthday, and the gaps are the years Krytenia declined to enter the World Cup. Naturally, The Doctor’s age is an error message. Any entries with missing rosters are filled if we can safely assume the player would have played that cycle.

Just below the elves is a player you definitely haven’t heard of. Not least because his name has been chopped off here. Miroslaw Szymkowiak, a player who attained 104 losses between cycles sixteen and forty. Miroslaw Szymkowiak played international football for Lovisa.

In fact, every player else on this list is Lovisan

We said previously that Eastfield Lodge were a team that didn’t make progress. They stayed perfectly still, and other teams shifted around them. In terms of being stationary, they can’t hold a candle to Lovisa. For the ages of these players we’ve used a scale from light yellow to deeper orange. As a player ages, the colour in their square should get darker as their age gets higher.

It.. noticeably does not do that. Lovisan footballers, for whatever reason, almost always stay the same age from tournament to tournament.

Let’s take this guy for example. Georg Lunz. The man whose name adorns the back of the kit Lovisa used for much of their tenure.

Lovisa debuted in World Cup 12. Using Forum Time, World Cup 12 took place in 2004. Lunz was right there. Young, wide-eyed and fresh-faced and ready to make his mark on the footballing world.

Four years and almost 30 cycles on, Georg Lunz was *still* playing international football for Lovisa in largely an unchanged squad. Every single player’s age had not changed except for midfielder Valdek Kulig, who had started World Cup 12 as a 30 year-old yet had lost four years at some point between World Cups 19 and 20.

Lunz survived Lovisa’s one and only squad shake-up, in Cycle 41, and it’s only at this point where his age was altered - from 22 to 24. He maintained a place in the squad right up until the side bowed out of competitive football after World Cup 49.

The World Cup 86 comeback, eleven years on, listed the same players.

Assuming Lunz experiences years at the same speed as the rest of us, we can assume he ages one year every 365 days that he experiences. As such a conservative estimate suggests that 1,095 days have passed for him between his first appearance as a 22 year-old and his most recent appearance as a 24 year-old. Lovisa have played 561 games in that time. As such, we can work out that Georg Lunz plays a game of international football, on average, once every 1.95 days.

Bear in mind, that is just *international* football. He shouldn’t have had any time at all for the club game, but his club career hasn’t been quiet at all.

In World Cup 12, Lunz was listed as playing for FC Leve, who would sell him to Giant Zucchini’s Bearnaise F.C where reports from May and June 2004 say he won the golden boot two seasons in a row. A return to Lovisa and club side Lovos-Renault Atma would follow, succeeded by a move to the adorably named Visby Nestle Quarcoo before joining Cafundeuese side América in 2008. There he’d stay for five documented seasons, winning the Empress Cup along the way. A transfer to Sao Jorge would come in 2009.

Lovisa have lost 183 games of international football throughout its history, and so Georg Lunz has lost 183 football matches throughout his international career. He is the captain of The CL Club. The Losing Man’s Loser.

The fact that so many Lovisans are on this list doesn’t necessarily mean Lovisa are losers. At odds with the theme of this episode, Lovisa are not a side that is generally associated with losing. Quite the opposite. We instead associate Lovisa with their catchphrase:

“Lovisa Win”

This isn’t a very apt catchphrase for Lovisa for two reasons.
One: Of all the teams to have played over five hundred World Cup games, they’re one of the few to have a win percentage below 50.
Two: Lovisa have never created a roleplay that contained only the phrase ‘Lovisa win’.

Trust me. I checked.

<Lovisa RPs>

So none of these match reports contain *only* the words ‘Lovisa Win’. The phrase only appears twice. Once as a fairly innocuous headline, once accompanied by a paradoxical ‘..but lose’, alongside a request that the hosts ‘change their minds’ about Lovisa not qualifying. It may sound strange but, at that moment, this was actually a reasonable request.

In the final game of the World Cup 15 Qualifiers Lovisa recorded a 2-0 win over mid-tens also-rans Shang-ti. Despite the victory, results elsewhere meant Lovisa finished fourth in the group, one place outside the qualifying spots.

Lovisa failed to qualify. Or so they thought.

Hosts Eauz and The Eagles Nest had been using these tiebreakers. After points put Kingsford top of the group, goal difference put The Belmore Family second. Head-to-head points couldn’t separate Cockbill Street or Lovisa, so head-to-head away goals were used, putting Cockbill Street through.

Back in those days, tie-breakers weren’t something that changed from tournament to tournament at the discretion of the hosts. Each of the previous fourteen World Cups had used Goals For as the third tiebreaker. Back in the days before style modifiers, this wasn’t problematic.

As the hosts hadn’t specified these tiebreakers in their bid thread, WCC President Kaze Progressa stepped in, requesting that the hosts stick to the established tiebreakers. Cockbill Street lose out. Lovisa win. And WCC regulations regarding tiebreakers were drafted shortly after.

At the finals, Lovisa and Aquilla were drawn together in Group F which, naturally, very much made that group the easiest in World Cup 15. Why, only a bunch of absolute morons wouldn’t be able to make it out of *that* group.

Lovisa would go on to reach the quarter-finals, losing to eventual champions Commerce Heights. It was Lovisa’s greatest performance in a World Cup up to that point, but they didn’t mention anything about it.

There’s a reason for this apparent indifference, which you may have already spotted.

The fact that Lovisa’s media output is pretty light is often used as a stick to beat them with. As if it’s a sign that Lovisans don’t care. I don’t think that’s true at all. Indifference doesn’t manifest itself in signing up for the World Cup 35 times. Indifference doesn’t take you to an expensive internet cafe in a foreign country to spend 5 cents a minute trying to touch-type on a largely alien keyboard in a second or third language. Indifference doesn’t have that kind of pull. You know what does have that kind of pull?

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.

It’s not quite so easy to keep coming back if you’re losing. And that’s why teams like Eastfield Lodge and Lovisa deserve to be commended on their longevity. They’re not here for glory, or for records, or just to annoy this guy. These teams are here out of love.

That *love* is the reason they keep coming back is a *good* thing. Love is not a weakness. Love… love is not a loss....

• Worst closing line ever.
• Uploaded on December 31st 2020. Originally had a second half that incorporated The Torch, but I'll save that for another time.

[The Idiot Project]

Chapter 1: Scorigami
And why it's a stupid way to start a series

A Scorigami is a result that has never happened before at that level in that sport. 1-1s and 2-1s have happened countless thousands of times throughout football history, but higher scorelines like 7-3 or 8-1 happen much less frequently. When two teams play a match that results in a unique scoreline, or at least the first scoreline of its kind, both teams have attained a Scorigami.

Whereas in sports like rugby and gridiron the pursuit of scorigami is a worthwhile endeavour - the scoring system means certain scores happen very rarely, such as those where both sides get low scores or results containing numbers not easily attained by adding 3s and 7s together - Soccer and Scorigami aren’t naturally suited to one another. One goal is worth one goal. The only interesting data to be had is in absurdly high-scoring matches. If you ever want to start a football video series with an eighty minute episode on some aspect of sports data, only someone with absolutely no idea what they were doing would choose scorigami.

So let’s keep this section short and sweet.

World Cup Scorigami - Cycles 1-86

UICA Scorigami - Cycles 1-73

The UICA engine is not made for scorigami.

As we’ll see in the rest of this series, UICA football is a different beast than NSWC football. How many six-goal blowouts happened in World Cup qualifying last cycle? 10? 30? More? When was the last time you saw a 6-0 or 7-1 in UICA or IFCF football? It’s not like it doesn’t or can’t happen, or that the scorinator is markedly different, it’s just the nature of the competitions. In the World Cup, a decent team has between 4 and 12 straight up gimmie matchups every cycle, rolling over some tinpot ragtag bunch of bare-footed island folk on the way to the real party. A good team competing in the UICA Champions League aren’t going to have to go through that same qualifying rigamarole. More often than not they get put straight into the group stages to play three of the best clubs world football has to offer.

Of all the teams to have played over 50 matches of UICA football, only a handful have a win percentage of more than fifty, and the majority of those are from associations that are, er, associated with the earlier days of UICA football.

Teams: 50+ UICA games    SOC           Percentage
Ranca Toco               CAF           59.95%
Dunboor FC               CAF           57.96%
Arrigo Portuguese        CAM           56.03%
Porto Lacruz             CAF           55.45%
Caires City              CAM           55.41%
Kitsilano Konquerors     COM           55.41%
Fryi Frêndê              FFD           55.36%
Cafundó do Juta          CAF           55.02%
AFF                      CAF           54.97%
County Stanley           LLF           54.51%
Handon United            SCT           54.43%
Black Oasis Athletic     COM           54.23%
SC Rinaldi               VAL           53.75%
CF Mont-Pluie            LLF           53.50%
Vezhidrupa               PZJ           53.45%
San Solari FC            COM           53.27%
Port Sebastian           SCT           53.19%
El din Marbles           CAM           53.03%
Albrecht FC              CAM           52.63%
Clube Comercial          CAF           52.60%
Clube Imperial           CAF           52.59%
Qidade Savana            JSY           52.49%
Petardos S/A             CAF           52.36%
Eldorado                 CAF           52.24%
Namiri Forest            ZWZ           52.00%
Kapundae FC              HAN           52.00%
Olympic Nassau Bay       NGD           51.72%
Ajax Khaldoon            QPM           51.67%
Tihon                    CMT           51.52%
Dûsanto Mojaikĭjĭ        JSY           51.43%
Sporting Esper           ZWZ           51.32%
Somer City and Surrounds ETM           51.16%
FC Fairleigh-Warburton   ETM           51.11%
Albrecht Turkish         CAM           51.01%
Ephesian FC              ZWZ           50.98%
Argos LP                 COM           50.93%
Soldarian FC             VAL           50.89%
Heidelstadt Falken       JSY           50.85%
Garitzeta Racing Club    ITB           50.60%
Nestingham FC            FAC           50.48%
Alianza FC               SJG           50.30%
Extramarine              MIU           50.00%
Liria Prizren            MYT           50.00%
Football Nordiqueville   SPT           50.00%
Exton FC                 APX           50.00%
Energia-Yaderny Miago    MYT           50.00%

Selected others
1830 Cathair             AUD           48.59%
Yuba United              COM           48.23%
Raynor City United       VAL           46.88%
Directus                 EUR           41.16%
AFC Treason              NPH           40.96%

Compare and contrast to the World Cup, where around two-hundred teams - a little under ten percent - have win ratios higher than .500. If you’ve entered twenty World Cups and have a win percentage of 45%, you’re probably Eastfield Lodge. If you’re playing UICA football every season and you have a win percentage of about 45, you might be one of the greatest teams of all time.

So Scorigami-wise, the UICA tournaments are more conservative than the World Cup. I spy something pretty interesting though. In seventy three cycles, two scores only happened once. A 6-6 and an 8-4. Cool. Let’s have a look at these games.

Ordinarily, this would mean I have to do some tiresome formula jiggery-pokery to find all the games which have a combined 12 goals and then wait for the document to figure out how to ctrl+f through eighty-five thousand results. At least, that’d be the case if this was The Idiot Project database. The UICA database was put together by someone who knew what they were doing. Looking up both matches is a synch because of this beautiful thing here.

This is ‘The Code’. Commerce Heights assigned every single official UICA game an official code. It works like this.

The first symbol is either C, G, S, X or !. Champions Cup, Globe Cup, SBCC, Supercup or a special one-off match.
The second symbol is the cycle, from 01 to 73.
The third symbol denotes the round. A-E are for preliminary rounds - the further through the qualifiers you go, the further through the alphabet you go. The key for the group stage is G, then it’s K and J for the second and third rounds, Q for the quarters, S for the semis and Z for the finals. In the Supercup, this is always X.
The fourth part is a number denoting which tie the match is. The seventh match of the first preliminary stage would therefore be A07. At the end, an A is for the first leg of an encounter and a B is for the second leg.
In group stage matches, this digit-digit-letter format is replaced by a letter-digit-digit. The letter is the group and the number is from 01 to 12 for which match it is.

So let’s look at these games.

Cycle 40, Globe Cup Playoff Round
(Liventia) Orean United 8-4 Seersha County (Ancharmunn)

In the thirty-seventh Globe Cup (UICA cycle 40. The Globe Cup started appearing in UICA cycle 4), the second leg of the Playoff Round match between Ancharmunn’s Seersha County and an Orean United team that hadn’t made an appearance in UICA football for eight cycles finished as a drab, scoreless 0-0 draw. As a result, Orean went through on aggregate 8-4.

Both sides had, evidently, played every single card they had in the first leg.

Orean’s all-time win-percentage of 36.25% is a modest one. The side were never quite the team in either Liventian domestic football or the LAPFL Federation - the combined domestic league of Adi’han and Liventia - commonly qualifying for the Globe Cup via their talent for winning domestic cup competitions while also slumping to 13th in the league.

Orean went into the match as second favourites.

Believe it or not, Seersha were the favourites.

Charmunnry clodhoppers Seersha County were, at the time, two-time National Premier League champions and had won the nation’s Challenge Cup competition the two seasons prior. A first foray into Globe Cup football had ended quickly against Cosumarites Kaldukosk, but Charmunnry football had come on leaps and bounds in that time and, despite their opposition having much more history in the competition, it was expected that Seersha would sneak it.

They did not sneak it. In fact in terms of sneakiness it was like they’d turned up in an empty field on a fluorescent orange Ducatti blaring jungle music in the midday sun while wearing a shirt saying ‘I am here’. They were, indeed, there. And then they weren’t.

Seersha County would stick around for a while, eventually joining the Tynealan league with Aelsh and Charmunnry clubs. Their greatest achievement in UICA football would come during this time. After being bundled out of the Champions Cup by RGS Athletic, they’d put a run together in the Globe Cup that would culminate in a 5-2 aggregate victory over Vanorians FC Capri. Deafeat in the second knockout round to Haitiëns would follow, and aside from one more group-stage Globe Cup exit that was it for Seersha in the UICA era.

Cycle 11, Champions Cup Preliminary Round
(Krytenia) Emberton Reds 6-6 Bradley Hornets (West Zirconia)

Most famous for being the answer to the odd-one-out round in a list including themselves and Royal Emberton, Krytenia Emberton, Patriots Emberton and Patriots Everton, Emberton Reds (formerly Everton City Reds. Ask your dad) are the poor half of a Krytenian derby, which takes the word ‘poor’ to its logical extreme. The side have played their football in the Overleague, Liga Calania, O-League, COCANEFA LigAnaia, COCANEFA Liga Calania and, eventually, the reformed O-League once again, and as such have floated aimlessly through more leagues than a bored octopus.

Involved in UICA football from cycle two, Emberton Reds are one of inter-associational football’s longest running members. Cycle 11 was their second bite of the cherry, having won the Overleague ahead of whatever their city rivals were calling themselves that week (I checked, it was ‘Krytenia Emberton’). They’d be put into the Champions Cup for all of two games, losing to Yaroslavl Axe Bears of Myedvedeya, before defeating Lecland’s Leyton FC over two legs to set up the tie with Bradley Hornets.

Bradley Hornets were no strangers to UICA football, having entered almost every season, never finishing below fifth (or above second) in West Zirconia’s Division One over those first eleven cycles. The side had made the group stage of the Globe Cup on a few occasions, making it to the knockouts once before being dispatched quickly by Cafundeuese opposition. They came into the game with Emberton Reds as favourites and duly took a 2-0 lead to Emberton, where they intended to get an away goal to all but seal the tie.

They ended up with six. An equal share of the twelve goals scored throughout the game.

Naturally, the Hornets progressed. Naturally, the group stage would be their ceiling.

Both sides found a measure of success later on. The Hornets would win the Globe Cup in cycle 36 and would add a Campeonato Rushmori to their respectable trophy cabinet. Emberton Reds would lose the final of the Globe Cup in cycle 30 and watch from the couch three days later as their rivals, calling themselves ‘Royal Emberton’ that day, stormed to victory in the Champions Cup and the Supercup.

Emberton Reds still exist today. They are as relevant as any team in the O-League.

[The Idiot Project]

The Unofficial Heavyweight Championship
The Original Belt
Not All Who Wander Are Gone

The UWCC (Unofficial World Championship Committee. It basically amounts to Jeremy Jaffacake wearing a hat) has been busy. Not content with confusing international football with talk of holy bloodlines and rumours of Al-Qurija being somehow the Last Scion, the UWCC has introduced a new unofficial title belt, this time for club football.

It is called, simply:

The title belt works largely the same way as the international version, with two important differences.

Firstly, while the UWC accounts for Extra Time and Penalties, the UHC does not. Only the score after ninety minutes is taken into account. Secondly, the rules on what to do in case of a disappearing belt are different. Whereas a new Interim UWC belt is created (and given to the World Cup winner) if no belts are active for a cycle, Interim UHC belts are created (and given to the winner of the Supercup) if no belts are active for three cycles in a row.

The first thing you’ll notice is that, while only three UWC ever appeared in international football between 2003 and 2019 (now four, with the disappearance of Free Republics), five different versions of the Heavyweight championship were required in the 2009-2019 UICA era, despite the three-cycle rule.

The colours of the five belts have been taken from the stripes of the IFCF logo, although red has been replaced by black for the second belt to make it a little more readable.

You’ll notice the first belt, in deep UICA purple, didn’t last very long at all.

Bedistani/Capitalizt greats Yuba United were given the inaugural Heavyweight championship after winning the first ever UICA Champions Cup, back then dubbed the Taqilquip Champions Cup.

Yuba United held the title twice over that initial period, from cycle 2 to cycle 6. Septentrionia’s CS Ourseville 1093 were the holders by the time the Cycle 6 Supercup started.

Were it not for the Supercup, we’d probably only have about two belts. The Supercup is a vortex which can, if the SBCC champion manages to defeat either the Globe Cup or Champions Cup winner, take the UHC out of the hands of a top team and leave it languishing in the lower reaches of a league system until that side either gets back into the SBCC or goes the whole hog and makes it into the Globe Cup again.

In cycle six, Ourseville 1093’s surprise defeat to SBCC winner Aliança, of the Cafundeuese second tier, took the first title out of circulation for four seasons. The UHC’s three-cycle rule meant that the Season 9 Supercup winner was given the first Interim Unofficial Heavyweight Championship. Gallingly for defeated former champs CS Ourseville 1093, it would be their city rivals Union d’Ourseville who would be given this new championship.

Aliança would find themselves back in the SBCC for season ten, going into the first preliminary round.

In the first leg, they retained their title with a 1-0 win at home. In the second, they were defeated by two goals to one. Aliança progressed on away goals, but at the cost of their Heavyweight belt, which they surrendered to their opponents.

It was their opponents’ first ever tie in inter-associational football. They had never been in a UICA tournament before.

They would never be in a UICA tournament again.

And why would they want to? They only needed to play two games before they became - rightly and provably and apparently permanently - the greatest team in the world.

Van Tienhoven. Zonenveld. Jonker. Van Voorhees. Ter Haar. Household names one and all. Heavyweight champions now for over a decade.

Ladies and gentlemen:

The Reigning Unofficial Heavyweight Champions

Argon Wanderers
Nethertopia

Nethertopia
06-02-2009, 14:44

The NeFA has selected the following clubs for the international copetitions:

TQCC:
1. Tenderville United
2. NAPPC
3. FC DePardenti
4. SVV Stoedt

Globe Cup:
1. Ratos Island Seaside
2. Ashdom City

SBCC:
1. Lake Rushmore
2. Argon Wanderers
3. Mignon United
4. September City


And hereby anounces the Nethertopian WendelCorp Divisions 1 and 2, the new Nethertopian professional competitions, which will be launched soon.

Argon Wanderers: Van Tienhoven ~ Thijs, De Ruine, Zonenveld, Claus ~ Jonker, De Witt, Van Voorhees, Ouke ~ Ter Haar, Reijers
Full name: Argon Wanderers
Manager: Wilbur de Goeij
Stadium: Trottinghole (cap. 15,000)
The Club: Oh, hey, look what we have got here. A club with not a single Golden Sovereign to spend, with a bad team, an incapable manager and a stadium that’s way too old to be used for anything but space to create houses. We can be short about this club: They don’t belong on the top notch level of international football. If they stay up it would be a miracle. But miracles do happen in football. We will see.

We must apologise for Argon Wanderers.. they are idiots..They were purposely trained wrong. As a joke.

I got in touch with a certain Stefano Stroopwaffel to ask for some information on this team, whose stadium Trottinghole sounds like two things you’d find on a farm and whose first eleven are probably farmers themselves. Stroopwaffel, the world’s foremost authority on Nethertopian football, has this to say about the mighty Argon Wanderers:

“Hang on, I actually managed to find them on a map”

That was it. Very little is known about the club, other than the fact that, as of recently, you can find this plaque outside their stadium.

Early on in the life of the international version of the Unofficial Championship, the reigning champions absconded with the original title and the first interim belt would be removed forever by cycle nine. With the club version we are, thus far, technically doing much better.

[The Idiot Project]

The Unofficial Heavyweight Championship
The Second Belt
From the Fringes to the Center

Union d’Ourseville lose the title at the start of cycle ten but win it back again near the end of cycle twelve, defending it unsuccessfully in the Champions Cup final against Albrecht FC of Candelaria And Marquez. The Black belt, like the original title, is duly lost in the Supercup as Albrecht are upset by a team named Terabits CE from Virçais. Terabits will make the Globe Cup, but not until five cycles later, and so a new belt is given to season fifteen Supercup winners CS Lac-Amédée of Septentrionia. More on that title later.

Terabits return to action in the Globe Cup in cycle seventeen, winning their two preliminary qualifiers but losing the belt in the group stage to Sorthern Northland’s Lispole Strand. It ends up with a team named Surgeons from Estresse Intenso (not to be confused with the team Plastical Surgeons, from the same nation. We think) who lend the title to San Diego Iguanas for a single leg of their knockout tie before losing it to SC Rinaldi, and it’s the Vanorians that take the title away, lending the belt to Septentrionia’s Football Nordiqueville in the first leg of their Globe Cup quarter-final, taking it back in the second leg, but being ousted from the tournament in the process.

They keep the belt for 36 cycles while around the darker reaches of Vanorian football.

By the time the title returns for cycle 53, we’ve had two unifications elsewhere - on both occasions unifying the fifth title with the fourth one - and the third title has been taken away. The fourth belt is removed from circulation at the end of cycle 54, leaving the black title the only Unofficial Heavyweight Championship in existence.

It turns out we never need another one. The black title traverses from the SBCC to the Supercup where Ulsa are waiting to gobble up a brave Ursona FC of Valanora, before Nithgard GU of Earent take the title.

It’s from here that the title is defended in an official UICA Ceremonial match for the first - and only - time, as Nithgard take on Franz Josef City a match commemorating UICA’s Diamond Jubilee. Franz Josef get the win at the Olympic Tower stadium in Aeropag, and bring the belt with them to the next Champions Cup.

Over the next 20 cycles, the Unofficial Heavyweight Championship will be defended every single season bar one - season 71, with FC Capri winning it during a Globe Cup Quarter-Final defeat and bringing it back for cycle 72, losing it in the preliminary stages to Kotaraja Pahlawan FC of Pauh Janggi.

UICA closed its doors at the end of the seventy-third season of its reign, before disappearing into the nether-realms. In doing so, it took with it one of the greatest teams of all time, and the final holders of the black belt.

The Other Reigning Unofficial Heavyweight Champions

Sonoma Center Panthers
Commerce Heights

The history of Sonoma Center Panthers dates back to the very first league table published in the multiverse’s very first Domestic Soccer Newswires thread in late 2003. Like the various Emberton clubs, they weren’t always known by their current moniker.

Bedistan Football League 2015 (published November 3rd 2003)                    
                         W  D  L GF GA  GD Pts
Graceville Salamanders  20  8 10 65 46 +19 68
---------------------------------------------
Dennis Bears            19 10  9 75 43 +32 67
Hampton Paladins        18 13  7 65 44 +21 67
Brooklyn FC             19  8 11 64 51 +13 65
Washington Tigers       18 10 10 66 49 +17 64
Yuba United             20  4 14 60 55  +5 64
Amissville Antagonists  17  9 12 65 56  +9 60
Mifflinburg FC          17  9 12 46 44  +2 60
High Mountain Buffalo   16  8 14 69 63  +6 56
Ilium Dragons           13 13 12 49 45  +4 52
Columbia Sharks         13 13 12 60 57  +3 52
Hundon FC               14  8 16 56 63  -7 50
Pine Village FC         15  5 18 57 66  -9 50
Sonoma City Volcanoes   12 11 15 57 63  -6 47
Jamaica Giants          12 10 16 50 56  -6 46
Griffin Zebras          12  8 18 46 60 -14 44
---------------------------------------------
St. Lawrence FC         11 10 17 54 53  +1 43
Eastfield Rogues        10  8 20 40 68 -28 38
San Diego Iguanas        6 10 22 38 70 -32 28
Hillcrest Hawks          6  9 23 39 69 -30 27

The Volcanoes became the Panthers in short order and they, alongside Jamaica Giants, Griffin Zebras, Yuba United and others, would eventually fall under the control of Commerce Heights, building greatly on their modest beginnings.

To get a feel for how important Sonoma Center Panthers in the UICA era, you just have to look at their stats. In terms of seasons entered and appearances in UICA football, SCP have the third most ever with 696 appearances over 70 seasons - only Raynor City United and Yuba United have more, but SCP edge out those two giants on win percentage and goals per game. With two Globe Cups and two Champions Cups to their name, they can lay claim to being a first-ballot hall-of-fame team of the UICA era.

Take a snapshot of the UICA rankings at any particular point over the last decade, the Panthers were likely in the top thirty. After UICA season 1 they were the 6th best team in the world, after season 73 they were second.

With the role that Bedistan and Commerce Heights played in the early days of domestic football, it’s perhaps fitting that one of the teams that formed the through-line from 2003 to 2019 gets to take the title off into the sunset with them. And of course, there’s always the possibility that one day, they might return...

The Unofficial Heavyweight Championship
The Third Belt
Take it Aweigh

All seemed fine with the third Unofficial Heavyweight Championship. From CS Lac-Amédée’s awarding of the belt after winning cycle fifteen’s Supercup up to cycle 30, with Jasiyun’s Heidelstadt Falken taking it from the Globe Cup’s group stage in cycle 20 only to pop up in the Champions Cup in cycle 22 and drop the title immediately to Taylor’s Cross of West Zirconia.

It’s fate, predictably, is the same as that of the first and second titles. Dullham Town of Liventia managed to upset Champions Cup winners Cafundó do Juta in the Supercup, and took the belt into the nether-reaches of the Series B Champions Cup. They’d enter the SBCC in cycle 30 and lose it to Pasarga’s SC Troubalose, and the belt would take a journey through Yuckyucks FC and Bradwell Saints before being won by the team who would take it out of circulation for good.

The Other Other Reigning Unofficial Heavyweight Champions

Tioka & Weybridge
Sorthern Northland

In T&W’s only ever season in Sorthern Northland’s Division One, they won 7 of their 38 games and finished second to last, getting relegated back down to the second tier and eventually making their way to the third division, where they’d stay.

It was during that brief cup of coffee at the height of Snorthern football that they enjoyed their only season of UICA football, as representatives of the since-vitrified nation in cycle thirty’s Series B Champions Cup. There, they’d put a decent run together, defeating Starblaydia’s Jhanna FC 3-0 twice, winning their group and making their way to the semi-finals after taking the UHC from Krytenia’s Bradwell saints in the quarters. They’d lose and regain the title against Union of Zarbli during an aggregate defeat, and that would be the last anyone ever heard of Tioka & Weybridge.

Until now, of course.

[The Idiot Project]

The Unofficial Heavyweight Championship
The Fourth and Fifth Belts
Quaternary Champions of the World: Unite!

In a refreshing change from the norm, the gold belt’s disappearance after five cycles is nothing to do with the Supercup. It is, instead, everything to do with the 90-minute rule.

Cycle 33 Supercup winners Qidade Savana of Commerce Heights are immediately defeated by Telecontarë, Starblaydia’s elven eleven, who go on a nine-game tear with the title during which time they win just three games and draw the rest. Good form for an Unofficial Heavyweight Champion, not so good for a team in the Champions Cup. After two one-all draws with Mytanija’s Decraa United Tele are ousted in extra time. They return the next cycle, again to the Champions Cup, and manage to keep the belt with them as they drop down to the Globe Cup via an away goals defeat to Pazhujeb’s FKM. They surrender the title in the group stages to Pulmonologists, win it back from SK Franz Josef City, drop it to Mercia Bromham in the knockouts, win it back in the second leg, drop it to Neurologists, win it back in the second leg, and eventually lose it to Osarius’s Burningham City.

By the time of the Globe Cup final, Commerce Heights’s Medoria Löwen are the holders, and while they hold Mar Sara to a draw to keep their UHC title, they’re defeated in extra time, and Medoria Löwen would not qualify for UICA football for the next five seasons.

Cue the fifth title, and Cycle 38’s Supercup winners East Franz Athletic. They begin season 39 as champions, Yuba United end the cycle with the belt and defend it comfortably in cycle 39’s Supercup, bringing the belt with them to cycle 40’s Champions Cup, for which Medoria Löwen have qualified. A unification is on. Both sides lose the belt early, but the titles escape the group stage, traverse the first knockout round, and meet in the Quarter FInals of season 40’s Champions Cup.

(Osarius) Grasshoppers Turic 2-1 Jamaica Giants (Commerce Heights]
Unofficial Heavyweight Championship Unification Bout - Champions Cup 40 Quarter Final, First Leg

Members of the inaugural Bedistani Football League back in 2003, Jamaica Giants never quite reached the heights of rivals Sonoma Center Panthers or Yuba United, taking part in ‘only’ thirty UICA seasons. In terms of games played in UICA football, they’re not alongside the old giants of UICA football, but rather some more familiar faces.

Most appearances - UICA Cycles 1-73
Rank  Team                NAT Nationality            Pld              
55	Mercia Bromham      KRY Krytenia               258
56	County Stanley      LLF LAPFL Federation       255
57	Iskara Daii         STB Starblaydia            250
58	1830 Cathair        AUD Audioslavia            249
59	Hastmead Diamante   OSR Osarius                248
60	Albrecht Turkish    CAM Candelaria And Marquez 247
61	Revolutionaries     EUR Eura                   245
62	Jamaica Giants      JSY Jasĭyun                242
63	Atlético Jutense    CAF Cafundéu               242
64	Sporting Iturributa ASG Astograth              236
65	Ciudad Soluca       SRG Sargossa               235
66	Stanley United      WZI West Zirconia.         234
67	Heidelstadt Falken  JSY Jasĭyun                234
68	Caires City         CAM Candelaria And Marquez 231
69	AC Izotz Zubia      AUD Audioslavia            229

The side had one golden era in Season 48 that was as short as it was bright. Over the course of three cycles, the side won the second division, won the Series B Champions Cup, qualified for the Champions Cup and then, in that third season, won that too. If you’ve ever wondered if a team has won back-to-back SBCC/CC UICA titles, look no further than the Jamaican Giant.

Speaking of Jamaican giants, Osarius had established itself as a force in domestic football by the time Grasshoppers Turic won the fourth UHC championship from Metropolis Alligators in the CC group stage. They’d keep the belt until that quarter-final with Jamaica Giants.

The Grasshoppers would win the battle, unifying both titles with a 2-1 win. The Grasshoppers would win the war, progressing to the semi-finals on away goals. The spoils, though, would go to the Giants, to took the title home with them, returning in cycle 42 to go on an eleven-game tear with the unified belt.

The unified title makes it to season 48 without issue, but it’s immediately pulled out from UICA football in the preliminary round of the Globe Cup, SK Franz Josef City, champions after a second-leg win over Navon Beach in season 47’s Champions Cup quarter-final, comfortably win the first leg of their preliminary with The Royal Barangay’s Racing Xinghua Baoyam, but a 1-0 defeat in the second leg takes the title to the Barangay. Gallingly, it will stay there for four cycles. The winner of cycle 51’s Supercup will be awarded another blue belt, the same one lost by Jamaica Giants to Grasshoppers Turic and immediately handed back to the UWCC.

The new blue belt lasts just one cycle. It’s unified with the gold belt on the opening match of the group stage in cycle 53’s Champions Cup, bringing to an end a short, glorious period where three belts were in play throughout UICA football, with SC Rinaldi having returned with the black incarnation of the belt.

The fourth and fifth titles would again be unified, this time in the group stage of Champions Cup 53.

(Buyan) Viztourzys Kolektyvinis 0-3 Sporting Iturributa (Astograth]
Unofficial Heavyweight Championship Unification Bout. Champions Cup 53 Group Stage.

Sporting Iturributa are another club to have played under more than one trigram. The Iturributans, voted Iturributan Team of the Century by UICA after cycle 50, have represented both their region and wider Astograth on the inter-associational stage. Thirteen times national champions, former Cygnus Cup winners and twice representatives of Astograth/Iturributa in the Ides of March cup, the Chevrons have represented their nation - whichever nation that is at the time - more than any other club from the Rushmori stalwarts.

Their opponents, Viztourzys Kolektyvinis, nicknamed the Red Machine, had won the Globe Cup in cycle 51, had won five of the previous six national championships and, with the game being played at the Nova Pylimasstadionas, went into the game as slight favourites.

Like a joy-ridden Ferrari, the Red Machine crashed against the Chevrons. Unlike a joy-ridden Ferrari, the Chevrons would lose their title to Raynor City United in the very next game, and RCU would take the unified title to the knockout stages.

The fact that the Black belt is here to stay means the fifth belt never has to make a return, despite the fact that the fourth championship only lasts until Season 54 before departing UICA football for good. It’s successfully defended in the final of that season’s Champions Cup by virtue of a 1-1 draw after 90 minutes. The holders lose on penalties, but hold onto the title.

They would not venture back into inter-associational football until IFCF cycle 5.

Garitzeta Racing Club
Iturributa / Astograth

Garitzeta Racing Club are another team to have represented both Iturrbuta and Astograth on the inter-associational stage. Whereas the likes of Sporting, Iturributa United and Iturraitz and the like represented the either/or over 25 or so cycles, though, Garitzeta played only eleven seasons of either Globe Cup or Champions Cup football, and are currently more notable for being a second tier side in Astograth - which is, with all due respect, not a great level of notability at all.

Despite their newfound mediocrity, the Other Racing won their first and only UHC title in the semi-final of the Champions Cup in Season 54, defeating CA Paulinthal home and away to make the final where Earent’s Nithgard failed to defeat them inside the ninety minutes before taking the game on penalty kicks.

Garitzeta Racing Club brought their Unofficial Heavyweight Championship with them to IFCF Season 5’s Liga B Champions Trophy, traversing two preliminary rounds before dropping the belt to Evenfar in the group stage. Evenfar would lose it to Falkner United on matchday two but gain the title back on matchday six, removing the belt from circulation.

Evenfar remain your Unofficial Heavyweight Champions.

Every UHC Winner - Cycle 1-73

[The Idiot Project]

The UICA Deep Field
Nothing is boring if you look close enough.

Over 73 cycles, certain teams played one another a silly amount of times. Here’s almost every matchup to have been played on ten or more occasions.

-----------------------------------------Games   1   -   2
Matchup                                     Pld   W   D   W
Sonoma Centre Panthers vs Raynor City United 16   11  4   1
Petardos S/A vs Raynor City United           14   7   2   5
Qidade Savana vs Petardos S/A                14   7   1   6
Qidade Savana vs Neurologists                14   8   1   5
CS Sept-Onze Ourseville vs Yuba United       12   1   3   8
Raynor City United vs Albrecht FC            12   3   1   8
Green Island vs Yuba United                  12   5   3   4
Petardos S/A vs Yuba United                  12   5   0   7
Neurologists vs Sokojiwa Dosi CK             12   5   3   4
Hondo FC vs Cafundó do Juta                  12   3   2   7
Carter FC vs Sonoma Center Panthers          12   4   2   6
Raynor City United vs Neurologists           12   7   2   3
Yuba United vs AS Bezieres                   12   8   2   2
Albrecht FC vs Yuba United                   11   3   5   3
Yuba United vs Qidade Savana                 11   6   3   2
Sonoma Center Panthers vs Cafundó do Juta    11   7   3   1
Caires City vs Raynor City United            11   4   2   5
Petardos S/A vs CF Mont-Pluie                10   2   5   3
Albrecht Turkish vs Soldarian FC             10   5   2   3
Raynor City United vs Medoria Löwen          10   6   2   2
Mylfe CE vs Dunboor FC                       10   3   2   5
Ranca Toco vs Caires City                    10   1   5   4
CS Ourseville 1093 vs Caires City            10   3   3   4
Neurologists vs Yuba United                  10   1   3   6
Psychiatrists vs Petardos S/A                10   1   3   6
Yuba United vs Psychiatrists                 10   3   3   4
Mercia Bromham vs Atlético Jutense           10   5   1   4
Petardos S/A vs Neurologists                 10   4   1   5
Surgeons vs CA Paulinthal                    10   3   5   2
Hondo FC vs Yuba United                      10   2   1   7
Pythons vs Ibini FC                          10   2   3   5
Ibini FC vs Yuba United                      10   2   3   5
East Franz Athletic vs Echegoyan FC          10   6   2   2
FC Endeavour vs Brinemouth                   10   5   2   3

Aside from the sheer amount of Vanorian and Paripanan teams throughout the list - which is understandable given that those two associations are the only two that entered every single UICA season - one of the most noticeable aspects of this list is a general lack of zeroes and ones. If two teams played one another regularly, they generally shared the spoils. It’s rare for one team to win more than 50% of all encounters with a rival, and the more times two teams have played, the more likely it is that their versus record is more or less equal.

With the exception of the matchup at the top of this list.

Code    Match#   Cyc  Comp.      NAT           Home           H     A  Away                    NAT
C04GB03   632    4    CC  Group  VAL      Raynor City United  1  -  1  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C04GB11   640    4    CC  Group  COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  2  -  0  Raynor City United      VAL
C10K05A   4394   10   CC  2nd R  VAL      Raynor City United  1  -  2  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C10K05B   4402   10   CC  2nd R  COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  3  -  1  Raynor City United      VAL
C15Q02A   8145   15   CC  QFs    COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  1  -  0  Raynor City United      VAL
C15Q02B   8149   15   CC  QFs    VAL      Raynor City United  1  -  2  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C19Q03A   11424  19   CC  QFs    COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  2  -  1  Raynor City United      VAL
C19Q03B   11428  19   CC  QFs    VAL      Raynor City United  0  -  4  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C32S01A   23256  32   CC  SFs    COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  2  -  2  Raynor City United      VAL
C32S01B   23258  32   CC  SFs    VAL      Raynor City United  0  -  1  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C46GD03   41118  46   CC  Group  VAL      Raynor City United  1  -  2  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C46GD11   41126  46   CC  Group  COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  3  -  1  Raynor City United      VAL
C56GD02   57412  56   CC  Group  COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  2  -  2  Raynor City United      VAL
C56GD10   57420  56   CC  Group  VAL      Raynor City United  5  -  0  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM
C62K02A   66184  62   CC  2nd R  COM  Sonoma Center Panthers  1  -  1  Raynor City 56’United    VAL
C62K02B   66192  62   CC  2nd R  VAL      Raynor City United  2  -  3  Sonoma Center Panthers  COM

“Let that be a lesson to you” shout RCU after demolishing the Panthers 5-0 in the group stage of cycle 56’s Champions Cup, “nobody beats Raynor City United eight times in a row”.

The fact that Rawrcrush Cinematic Universe have a bogey team is like finding out that Thor used to get picked on at school. The Panthers, while unquestionably one of the greatest sides in club football history, had a ridiculous hoodoo over the Vanorian heavyweights. There’s no smoke and mirrors here, like there might be when looking at the records of similarly tanky teams like AFC Treason and Directus, who had to first wander into the firing line as an unranked n00b at some point. Both RCU and SCP have always been present in UICA football. This is a proper hoodoo that, on a blustery winter’s evening in deepest, darkest southwestern Atlantian Oceania, was snapped by an RCU team in full-on limit-break mode.

Panthers versus Rockers is at the top of this list, but the list is missing the absolute number one most-played matchup in UICA history.

C02K04A  VAL  Raynor City United  2  -  1  Carter FC  JSY
C02K04B  JSY  Carter FC           1  -  1  Raynor City United  VAL
C03GC03  VAL  Raynor City United  1  -  0  Carter FC           JSY
C03GC11  JSY  Carter FC           1  -  2  Raynor City United  VAL
C31GD05  JSY  Carter FC           1  -  1  Raynor City United  VAL
C31GD07  VAL  Raynor City United  0  -  1  Carter FC           JSY
C32Q04A  JSY  Carter FC           2  -  1  Raynor City United  VAL
C32Q04B  VAL  Raynor City United  3  -  1  Carter FC           JSY
C36GA03  VAL  Raynor City United  1  -  0  Carter FC           JSY
C36GA11  JSY  Carter FC           4  -  2  Raynor City United  VAL
C39GG03  VAL  Raynor City United  2  -  0  Carter FC           JSY
C39GG11  JSY  Carter FC           1  -  2  Raynor City United  VAL
C45Q02A  JSY  Carter FC           1  -  1  Raynor City United  VAL
C45Q02B  VAL  Raynor City United  0  -  0  Carter FC           JSY
C56GD03  VAL  Raynor City United  0  -  2  Carter FC           JSY
C56GD11  JSY  Carter FC           1  -  0  Raynor City United  VAL
C57GG03  JSY  Carter FC           3  -  3  Raynor City United  VAL
C57GG11  VAL  Raynor City United  2  -  0  Carter FC           JSY
C61K02A  VAL  Raynor City United  1  -  1  Carter FC           JSY
C61K02B  JSY  Carter FC           3  -  2  Raynor City United  VAL
C63GA03  JSY  Carter FC           2  -  1  Raynor City United  VAL
C63GA11  VAL  Raynor City United  3  -  0  Carter FC           JSY

On 22 occasions between 2009 and 2018, RCU faced off against Carter FC of Jasiyun in the Champions Cup. And only in the Champions Cup. And mainly in just the group stages or the early knockout rounds. Raynor City United edged the series, with nine wins to Carter’s 7.

It’s somewhat surprising that the two teams with the most number of appearances in UICA football - Yuba United and Raynor City - only played one another on six occasions.

C21Q03A  COM  Yuba United         1-0  Raynor City United  VAL
C21Q03B  VAL  Raynor City United  1-1  Yuba United         COM
C34Z00F  COM  Yuba United         1-1  Raynor City United  VAL (1-2 AET)
C49K04A  COM  Yuba United         0-1  Raynor City United  VAL
C49K04B  VAL  Raynor City United  1-2  Yuba United         COM
!671004  VAL  Raynor City United  3-0  Yuba United         COM

The six games include two Champions Cup knockout matches, both won narrowly by Yuba United, a Champions Cup final won by Raynor City United in extra time and a one-off UICA Centenary game at the Battleground in Raynor City, which the home team won by three goals to nil.

Teams who stuck around for a long time tended to play against one another at least once. Those who ended up playing at least one hundred UICA matches are part of the One Hundred Club. Each and every member of the club is detailed here in an image we call the UICA Deep Field, so called because it looks a little bit like the Hubble Deep Field.

The Hubble Deep Field which is what happened when a dude stared really hard at something boring and distant but found that it looked kinda pretty if you gave it a backstory. It’s very Idiot Project.

[The Idiot Project]

The Sosimo Lissón Metric
Refusing to Lose: Club Remix

The Sosimo Lissón metric is named after the erstwhile former Aguazul striker who won three consecutive World Cup titles with the side in international cycles 57 to 59. The metric attempts to find the greatest ever three-cycle run by a team, where ‘greatest ever’ means ‘lost the least times’. Lissón’s Aguazul side lost only twice in 69 games for a Sosimo Lissón Metric score of 34.5 - the metric simply takes the total games played over three consecutive cycles and divides that figure by how many times a team lost.

The second greatest ever run is by Valanora from cycles 73 to 75, with a score of 35, while Schottia’s 78-80 side were the only team to lose just one game over three cycles, attaining a score of 70. You can watch that Idiot Project video here for the full story. It’s one of the best TIP videos. I’m sure it still holds up even if the ending has been given away.

In international football, a decent team can expect to play around 70 WCC games over the course of three cycles. In UICA football, a good team plays around half as many games. If they don’t lose often in one cycle, there’s a good chance they won’t have to play as many preliminary games in the next cycle. 6 group games plus anywhere between 2 and 10 knockouts makes for an average of around 12 matches for a capable football club in any given UICA season. Most international teams play nearer 18 even if they don’t qualify for a tournament. Also, as we’ve mentioned before, you’re much more likely to play teams of equal or greater standing than your own in UICA football, and often enough that high Sosimo Lissón Metric scores are much rarer. in the club game.

In international football, Sarzonia have the tenth-best Sosimo Lissón score of all time - a 19.67 gained between cycles 22 and 24. In the UICA era, the tenth best team in the Sosimo Lissón Metric standings is San Solari FC for their run between cycles 13 and 15. Their score over this period? Just 8.6. They lost 5 times in 21 games, and it appears this type of record, while rubbish for an international team, is excellent for a club side.

International football’s Sosimo Lissón chart. Most teams have a score between 2 and 8.
The highest team has 70.


The Club version of the Sosimo Lissón chart has lower scores at the top. The highest-placed team has a score of just 18.
Most teams have a score between 2 and 4.

At the bottom of UICA’s Sosimo Lissón chart are Football Miracle Izaki (Damukuni, cycles 70-72), Siêu tuyệt vời (Unlreal 229, Cycles 18-20), Anseriska FK (Anseriska, Cycles 23-25), Cotham Knights (The Islands of Qutar, Cycles 15-17) and Sjandle FootballKlub (Schmeigelland, Cycles 48-50), all with a score of just 1, meaning that, in their greatest ever run in inter-associational football, they lost every game they had for three consecutive cycles.

The requirement for a team to have played three cycles consecutively removes most teams from the list, but while there are 645 teams to have played at least 3 consecutive cycles of international football, over a thousand have done so in the club game. The chart above cuts 500 of them off the end.

So. You’re wondering who’s in the top ten, right?

Pos Club               Era  NAT  Nation                 Sosimo Lissón Metric
001 ???                                                 18
002 Ranca Toco        8-10  CAF  Cafundéu               12
003 Qidade Savana    31-33  JSY  Jasĭyun                10.5
004 Caires City      13-15  CAM  Candelaria And Marquez 10.2
005 Spartangrad      49-51  EUR  Eura                   10
006 Prune Farmers FC 57-59  GGS  Gregoryisgodistan      10
007 Canterlot Stars  55-57  EQS  Equestrian States      10
008 Feest United     65-67  KTW  Katawohan              10
009 Iguani           40-42  PZJ  The Pazhujeb Islands   8.67
010 San Solari FC    13-15  COM  Capitalizt SLANI       8.6

It is a chin-strokey top ten. Ranca Toco are often in the upper echelons of these UICA lists, having had a strong side in the early days of UICA football in a time where there were fewer big teams to play against. Qidade Savana and Spartangrad aren’t surprises, and neither is the Canedelarian and/or Marquesi side in fourth, but… Prune Farmers? Canterlot Stars? And who on earth are Feest United?

Wait okay it’s my job to tell you who they are.

Feest United had already entered two UICA cycles by the time season 65 came around. They played all of two Globe Cup matches that cycle, drawing twice with Turín FC of San José Guayabal and departing on away goals, going undefeated against Olastor’s Cavecla Sports Club and Turori’s Cednia Rovers in cycle 66, losing the latter on away goals after two draws, and beating Lusitanha’s Seviha FC in the preliminaries of the next Globe Cup before losing over two legs to Carter FC, 1-0, 0-1, 1-3 on penalties.

One loss in 10 games. Eighth best team of all time. Sceptical? Well just look at Katowohan’s football website and look at the amount of goals that Feest striker Teun Wilms scored. 68 in 38 games. Sixty-eight. He didn’t even win the golden boot. Scary league.

Look at the number one team, though. A Sossimo Lissón score of 18. That’s mighty impressive considering how easy it is to lose in UICA football.

So who is it? Who’s here at the top of this metric?

Okay so like.. I don’t expect everyone reading this to be familiar with Idiot Project tropes but… honestly, when it comes to the question of ‘I wonder who is at the top of this chart’ you should really already know the answer…

Clicking the image takes you directly to YouTube