What if football championships were lineal? | Hacker News Reader

What if football championships were lineal?

ufnc.xyz

14 pointstigro712 comments

Unofficial National Football Championships was born to answer a simple question: who would be the reigning national champion if football worked with a title-based challenge system?

Inspired by UFWC, which determines the unofficial world champion, I wondered if the same concept could be applied to national leagues. The idea is straightforward: starting from the first official league match and considering only official games with clear participation rules, whoever defeats the reigning champion claims the title and must defend it in future matches.

However, implementing this system turned out to be much more challenging. Initially, I manually reconstructed the sequence of title matches in a spreadsheet, thinking it was just a fun project to share with friends. Then, I stumbled upon a post on r/Italy from another user who had done the same research. Comparing our data, I realized I had overlooked title defenses and needed a more structured approach.

The real turning point came when I had the opportunity—both professionally and personally—to explore new technologies and apply them to a concrete project. I transferred the records to a relational database and built an initial web interface, featuring dedicated pages for teams, matches, and an interactive timeline of "title reigns."

After months of work, I refined the site and integrated a tool that automatically retrieves match data from online sources. To make things even more engaging, I added achievements for teams based on unique statistics. For example, Como, the most recent champion, earned the "Sleeping Giant" badge (for the third time in its history) after reclaiming the title against Napoli following a 10+ year drought (23 years and 32 days, to be exact).

If you're a football nerd and a stats enthusiast like me, check it out! Which league would you like to see next? I’ve already planned the English Premier League, but I’m open to suggestions!

So in this system, every match which doesn't involve the current "champion" is irrelevant?

I found the description on the website confusing, not being a football fan. It's basically a king of the hill system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineal_championship

Ah thanks, that explains a lot

It’s irrelevant in terms of the transfer of the title, but it might affect who gets to challenge the current champion. E.g. the opportunity might go to the competitor who’s won the most matches since they last fought the champion. Or it might go to who they think would sell the most tickets to the title match, and winning your previous matches would generate that hype.

This might be better as a 'Show HN' post, since it seems you're the author and the poster. Cool project, by the way!

I don't know if changing that would require @dang involvement or not.

apologies for the scepticism, but I'm struggling to see how this took months of work. all you need is a simple web-scraper/API call that generates/updates a csv with every game and its outcome, a very very simple algorithm, and then some code that presents it in a web page. okay you've added in some nice extra stats, but they don't appear to be significantly complex. am I misunderstanding how this works somehow? are you including cup data and friendlies?

This has been done for national rugby union teams. They worked it out from 1871 on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raeburn_Shield

It's a fun thought experiment, but ultimately meaningless. Football games aren't always played to be won.

This is a difference from sports like boxing where lineal championships are traditionally tracked. There's no reason to rest during a boxing match, or to fight for a win or draw.

Here is a similar page but for American College Football. It is often called “The Belt” in CFB circles.

https://www.hatchrankings.com/lineal.html

What if... primate species overcame the inexplicable obsession of playing with balls?

Or, in the modern world, even just the obsession of watching other primates play with balls on television while drinking alcohol and fighting over who played with the ball best?

It's always been a mystery to me...

I wish the Stanley Cup would return to challenge matches!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com