The Fallacy Of World Rankings In Professional Sports

If a tennis player

Wins all his tournaments

Or most of his tournaments

On the professional stage

It may be accurately stated

That he is the best tennis player in the world.

 

The same goes

For any athlete

In any sport.

 

But world rankings

Are but a specious concept.

 

Firstly,

What does it matter

Who the 7th ranked player in the world is

In any sport.

 

Or the 28th

Or the 95th

Or even the 2nd.

 

Because these things

Have been forced into public significance,

World ranking systems are born.

 

There is a practicality to it.

But only because the flawed philosophy

Has bled into the business world.

 

For instance,

A player’s contract often states

That X world ranking

Earns him an additional financial reward.

 

Therefore,

One’s world ranking

Has a real world benefit.

 

But this discourse

Is not interested

In the fallacies of the business world.

 

It is interested in

Examining the significance of world rankings.

 

Because of the fact

That the thinking and philosophy

That led to creating world rankings

Is part of the flawed thinking and philosophy of humans,

It will necessarily be prevalent

In every facet of society.

 

World rankings

Use various metrics

And formulae to rank players.

 

This one fact alone

Immediately invalidates the entire concept.

 

For if a mathematical formula is needed . . .

If one’s performance must be divided by 37,

And multiplied by 0.27,

Subtracted from the days on the lunar calendar,

And multiplied by the number of times a dog barks on a moonlit night . . .

The rankings aren’t ranking anything.

 

When Tiger Woods was world number 1,

No mathematical formula was needed.

No divisor was required.

No multiplications, divisions, and subtractions were needed.

No calculator, pie chart, abacus, horoscope, rulers, or rosary beads were required.

 

When Tiger Woods was world number 1,

Mathematicians and statisticians

Were free to go on vacation.

Their services were not required.

 

Tiger was the greatest player in the world.

And there was not so much as a thought

That was required to state this.

 

No mathematical formula,

No trigonometry,

No calculus required.

 

But these days,

The mathematicians

And the statisticians

Must be on-call

24/7.

 

For the athletes,

The coaches,

The reporters,

And the world at large wait in suspense

For the trigonometric results

To be revealed.

 

One guy scored a point or a stroke better

On the 12th day of November.

And if we multiply this by his shoe size,

And divide it by the amount of weight he can lift,

And add three divisors,

And by the amount in inches his navel inverts or protrudes,

The new world number 1 by 0.00007534 points is . . .

 

If mathematics is required

To declare a world number 1,

There is no world number 1.

 

 

Namaste.