A Fairer Way
Justice for underdogs!
Last night, the United States men’s national soccer team notched a 6-0 victory against their counterparts from Saint Kitts and Nevis in the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the biennial competition for the 41 members of the North American organizing body for international soccer.
In many ways, it’s not a particularly unusual result - sure, six goals to nothing isn’t a close match, but Saint Kitts only got in via a playoff victory and are the lowest-seeded team remaining in the competition, while the United States is the top dog. This is a much more reasonable result than the 1-1 draw to Jamaica that the US played through the other night, from an objective standpoint (ignoring American men’s soccer’s ability to shoot itself in the foot).
That, in and of itself, isn’t particularly unusual. We should be beating minnows 6-0.
But I do love an underdog.
International sports are, by definition, inherently unfair. No one country is uniform in population, both by size and how it’s composed, whether that be through lines divided by gender, age, height - literally any physical characteristic.
No countries are uniform in their geography, either - sure, small island nations tend to follow similar archetypes, but it’s far from 1:1, and those are about as close as we get - consider the differences between, say, the Maldives (average elevation above sea level is less than six feet), and Bhutan (average elevation close to 11,000 feet, just shy of two miles).
Factors like that, we can’t control. Trying to make entire populations wholly uniform is… a problematic ideal, to say the very least, and it would defeat the point of the Olympics or the World Cup or any sort of competitive endeavor, because if everyone’s the same, what’s the point of trying to separate out who’s the best?
I mentioned them earlier, but let’s circle back to Saint Kitts and Nevis for a second.
If you’re not like me (read: used to wake up at 5am to huddle in a blanket and read my atlas at the ripe age of six), you might not know a lot about Saint Kitts. I wouldn’t expect many people to know of its history, home to the first British and French colonies in the Caribbean (and as such sometimes referred to as the ‘Mother Colony of the West Indies’), nor would I expect you to know that it was the last Caribbean state to declare independence in 1983. I wouldn’t assume that people know that the Kitts in Saint Kitts is a shortening of Christopher, nor that that name was originally bestowed by Columbus (though these days we think it was to the nearby island of Saba, and mapmakers just kinda… kept getting it wrong until it stuck. Oops!)
Today, I only need you to know three things about Saint Kitts and Nevis. Really, it’s only two, but the third gets in by Rule of Cool.
Saint Kitts and Nevis is the smallest sovereign state in the Western Hemisphere by area, measuring just 101 square miles, roughly the size of Tallahassee, Florida.
Saint Kitts and Nevis is the smallest sovereign state in the Western Hemisphere by population, with 54,817 people per the CIA World Factbook’s 2023 estimates. This would make it the 69th-largest city in Texas (nice), the 18th-largest city in Minnesota, and the 172nd-largest city in California.
Saint Kitts and Nevis’ men’s soccer team is named the Sugar Boyz. I just think that’s neat.
Saint Kitts isn’t the smallest of the 41 members of CONCACAF, the organizing body for international soccer for North America, Central America, and the Caribbean (that distinction goes to the island of Montserrat, population 5,440), but it’s the smallest independent state and it’s also the one that happened to play the US last night, which returns me to my original point.
You may have seen some of these crazy scores before - Taika Waititi is making a dramatization based on a brilliant documentary called Next Goal Wins, covering the American Samoa team’s quest for redemption following their 31-0 hammering at the hands of Australia in 2001. Two days prior to that murder, Australia had beaten Tonga 22-0, and both of these had passed Kuwait’s record set in 2000, with a 20-0 dismantling of Bhutan.
Though last night’s match obviously doesn’t come close to any of those in terms of the gulf between teams, it still got me thinking, particularly with regard to point 2.
Saint Kitts has a population of 54,817 people. That’s smaller than Greenland, less than a tenth of the population of any of the states, and all of it is concentrated on two islands that combined would be the 114th largest city in the United States by area.
The United States has an estimated population, per the CIA World Factbook, of 339,665,118. Some quick napkin math tells me that the US population is 6,196 times as large as Saint Kitts and Nevis.
6,196. Bro.
I’m not here to advocate for these teams to stop playing each other - quite the opposite. My favorite matches on earth are the ultimate minnows getting shots at the big dogs, and they’re all the more glorious when teams do manage to swing the upset. International sport is about bringing everyone together, and forcing separation on strata based on area or population would only serve to hinder that goal.
Instead, I had a terrific idea last night that I’d like to bring to the table.
Let’s level the playing field and turn that 6,196 to 1.
My proposition is as follows: for international competitions, roster pools are randomly drawn from the citizenry, but the draw is only as large as the smallest nation’s population.
In other words, the United States would pull a pool of 54,817 Social Security Numbers, and out of that population, they’d need to draft a roster to throw into the 2023 Gold Cup. For the Euro 2024 qualifiers that are ongoing, all 55 UEFA member nations would have to put forth a roster pulled from a pool of 29,629, given that’s Gibraltar’s estimated population.
You can argue that, if anything, it gives smaller nations a significant advantage, because they’re more likely to see their specialized athletes appear in their pools, but there’s also the element of hilarity present for bigger nations, because let’s be real: you think that if LeBron James shows up in that FIFA pool, he’s not getting tossed onto that pitch in a heartbeat? I’d pay to see it.
It’s an absurd concept, one that would never be made into reality, but it’s one that I personally think holds some pretty solid water. You think Australia would have still beaten American Samoa by 31 goals if it was Paul from Alice Springs up top instead of Archie Thompson? Do we earnestly think that the USWNT still takes Thailand apart 13-0 at the World Cup in this situation?
This doesn’t just have to be soccer - think about the demolitions you hear about all the time in international basketball. I dunno about y’all, but I sure remember when the United States blew Nigeria out 156-73 in the 2012 Olympics, or when the women’s U-16 team beat El Salvador 114-19 (yes, that was the actual scoreline). You think we couldn’t make things a little squarer that way too?
We always hear about international sport as this opportunity to bridge gaps and extend the hand of friendship, a way to bring people together through competition. I just think we can make it a little fairer for the little guys.