Research by Eli Ben-Naim, Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez, physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has determined that soccer is more competitive than hockey, baseball, football and basketball. Their findings are published in a report entitled "What is the most competitive sport?"
The researchers analyzed the results of over 300,000 games from the "big 4" sports as well as the English football Premiership. The sample included the results of 39,563 NHL games played between 1917 and 2004.
Ben-Nain and his colleagues defined competitiveness based on the unpredictability of results. An unpredictable result occurs when the team "with a worse record overcomes an apparently superior one." The more upsets a league has, the more exciting it is. Thus Atlanta's unpredictable 8-3 whupping of the Senators would be considered exciting.
The research found that upsets occur most often in the English Premiership, followed by MLB, the NHL, the NBA and the NFL.
The full report, can be found here (pdf). From the conclusion:
In summary, we propose a single quantity, q, the frequency of upsets, as an index for quantifying the predictability, and hence the competitiveness of sports games. We demonstrated the utility of this measure via a comparative analysis that shows that soccer and baseball are the most competitive sports.
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