On 8 April 1967 a 100-1 outsider called Foinavon won the Grand National, the most bet-on horse race in the British calendar. Forty horses face thirty fences over four-and-a-quarter miles around the rolling course at Aintree on the outskirts of Liverpool. Most years not even half of them make it to the finish. 

Foinavon’s owner had decided not to attend the race. He was at Worcester instead, riding another of his horses. His regular jockey had declined the ride because the owner wouldn’t pay the standard Grand National fee, so the replacement, John Buckingham, had been found three days before the race. 

At the 23rd fence, a loose horse called Popham Down veered hard right and triggered a pile-up of almost every other runner. Foinavon, in 22nd position when the chaos started, was the only horse with enough room to steer wide, find a small gap in the fence and jump cleanly. He won by 15 lengths. Bookmakers paid out at 100-1. In 1984, Aintree officially named the smallest fence on the course after him.

Foinavon’s race is a case study in why we keep building sporting events that the better contestant can lose. The format gave the worst horse on the card a perfectly legal route to the trophy. Sixty years later, the rest of professional sport has spent the intervening decades putting more of this kind of jeopardy in, not less. The last two weeks of the 2026 sporting calendar are proof.

On Sunday 24 May, Felix Rosenqvist won the 110th Indianapolis 500 by .0233 of a second over David Malukas, the closest finish in the car race’s history. That same evening at the Telekom Center in Athens, Olympiacos defeated Real Madrid 92-85 in the EuroLeague Basketball Final, ending a 13-year wait for the European title and breaking the nine-year first-place regular-season curse in one night. 

This weekend in tennis, Roland Garros will crown two first-time Grand Slam champions. The women’s final pits No. 8 seed Mirra Andreeva against qualifier Maja Chwali?ska, the first player ever to reach a Roland Garros singles final straight from qualifying. The men’s semifinals were the first at any Grand Slam since the 1977 French Open to feature no former major champion in either draw.

Two new champions already crowned in late May, and the most upset-prone Roland Garros in 49 years still to play.

Creating tournaments that are less fair on purpose

Why these formats and underdog outcomes exist is explained by Dr Anastasios Dosis, professor of economics at ESSEC Business School in Paris and co-holder of the ESSEC Sports Chair. In an essay published two days before the EuroLeague Final in ESSEC Knowledge, Dosis defended the Final Four format against the chorus of coaches and journalists arguing that European basketball should adopt the NBA’s best-of-seven playoff series. The Final Four condenses an entire 38-round season into one weekend in one city: two semifinals on Friday, the final on Sunday.

“The Final Four is less fair,” Dosis writes, “and that is precisely why it is more compelling.”

The coaches had a case. Olympiacos head coach Giorgos Bartzokas, whose team won on Sunday night, said after qualification that “the best team has to play the whole season in one single game.” 

The veteran Dimitris Itoudis, now at Hapoel Tel Aviv and a former CSKA Moscow head coach, has called the Final Four “an unfair system” that “gives extra chances to underdogs,” and has argued for years that “basketball equals playoffs.” The first-place team in the EuroLeague regular season had not won the title in any year since the modern round-robin format was introduced in 2016-17. Olympiacos entered the final as the season’s top seed, broke the curse, and gave Dosis’s argument a complication he will enjoy writing up later.

Dosis’s case for the format rests on the economics of what fans actually pay to watch. The uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis, formalised by Knowles, Sherony and Haupert in 1992 and refined for basketball by Rascher and Solmes in 2007, finds that fan interest does not peak when a game is a 50-50 toss-up. It peaks somewhere around the 0.60 to 0.66 probability of the home team winning.

Audiences want their team favoured, but not so favoured that the result is decided. They want hope. They want jeopardy. A best-of-seven series mostly delivers the favoured outcome and dilutes the jeopardy across multiple games. A single-weekend Final Four can erase a season in one bad quarter. “For coaches and players, this is cruel,” Dosis writes. “For fans, it is gold.”

Uncertainty in sport isn’t enough

The economist argument that uncertainty drives audiences has been challenged by Professor Babatunde Buraimo at the University of Liverpool Management School, in long-running collaboration with Professor Rob Simmons at Lancaster University Management School. Buraimo and Simmons spent the better part of two decades testing the uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis empirically against English Premier League television audiences, the most-watched football league on earth.

Their 2008 paper in the International Journal of Sport Finance asked the question that became the title: “Do sports fans really value uncertainty of outcome?” Their 2015 follow-up in the International Journal of the Economics of Business, Uncertainty of Outcome or Star Quality? Television Audience Demand for English Premier League Football, reported the result of eight seasons of TV viewing data. The finding was unambiguous and slightly inconvenient for the textbook hypothesis.

Uncertainty of outcome had imprecise effects on EPL TV audiences in earlier seasons and zero effect in later ones. What drove audiences instead was the presence of star players. “The notion of a pure sporting contest in which uncertainty of outcome matters is no longer relevant,” Buraimo and Simmons concluded. “More important is the extent to which sports teams and leagues can increase the quality of the talent on show.”

A 2017 follow-up in Applied Economics Letters reinforced the finding. Fans want uncertainty, but they want star quality more. The events that maximise both are the events that work.

Of course Knicks fans only want one thing

New York Knicks fans have wanted one thing for 53 years. The Knicks last won the NBA championship in 1973, with Willis Reed leading them past the Lakers in 5 games, and the city has had to settle for everything else basketball offers in the half-century since. 

Until last week, even reaching the Finals had been a 27-year wait. The Knicks landed there by winning 11 consecutive playoff games at an average margin of 23.8 points, which is the kind of streak that resolves the uncertainty-of-outcome argument for a fanbase on the spot. The question for New York becomes star quality alone, and the star quality is Jalen Brunson, who has played his way into the franchise’s all-time top tier this postseason.

The 2026 NBA Finals are a rematch of 1999, the last time the Knicks played for the trophy, which the San Antonio Spurs won 4-1 for their first championship. The Spurs are back in the Finals for the first time since 2014. Their star this time is Victor Wembanyama, the 2026 Defensive Player of the Year, a 7-foot-4 generational talent whose presence on the floor changes how the opposing offence has to think about every possession. Two megastars. Two storied franchises. One trophy. A best-of-seven series with the possibility of a deciding Game 7 on 19 June.

After winning the first two games on the road, New York is holding its breath. The city has been waiting for longer than most of the fans in Madison Square Garden have been alive. Audiences may want uncertainty and star quality, andKnicks fans currently have both. But they only want one outcome.

The biggest upset in the history of the World Cup

The largest single experiment in format jeopardy in the history of team sport begins on 11 June. The 2026 FIFA World Cup opens with Mexico against South Africa at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. The tournament is the first 48-team World Cup. 104 matches across 16 cities, hosted between the United States, Canada and Mexico. The biggest event the sport has ever staged.

The most interesting team in it, by some distance, is Cape Verde. The Blue Sharks qualified on 13 October last year with a 3-0 win over Eswatini, having topped their group four points clear of Cameroon. Cape Verde is the second-smallest country by land area ever to qualify for a World Cup, with a population of just under 525,000, smaller than Tucson, Arizona. Their opening fixture is on 15 June in Atlanta. The opposition is one of the tournament favourites, Spain.

A Cape Verde win over Spain would be tight up there in the long history of World Cup upsets. Cameroon beat Argentina in 1990. Senegal beat France in 2002. Saudi Arabia beat Argentina in 2022. Each of those single-match results survived in the highlight reels, but none of those teams went on to win the trophy.

Cape Verde winning the World Cup would be the largest single result in the history of major team sport. Bigger than Foinavon at Aintree. Bigger than Greece at Euro 2004. The format gives them a real route to it, the kind no league table ever would. 

Dr Anastasios Dosis from ESSEC would smile. Professor Babatunde Buraimo at the University of Liverpool Management School would point out that Spain still have most of the talent in the room.

The world will watch either way. That’s why it’s the beautiful game.

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