Which championship is hardest to win

Winning the Stanley Cup is, without question, one of the highest sporting achievements in the world. Teams have to come together for a minimum of 98 games a year 82 regular season games, a minimum of 16 playoff games and have performed well over a minimum of 5, minutes of hockey and more than likely, well over 6, to win enough of them to be crowned the top team in hockey, one of the fastest team sports on Earth.

It's become an article of faith among hockey fans that no trophy is harder to win in all of sports. It's one of the top reasons used to deify hockey players and the sport itself among fans, as well as one of the quickest arguments to appear in any discussion among sports fans about why "their" sport is the best. But here's the thing. Is it something based on fact? We decided to investigate in an attempt to find out just which trophy is the hardest to win in professional sports?

It started out as idle speculation, but this eventually became a mammoth task of stats analysis, weighing, comparison of sports, and internal debate.

This is the result. But first of all, in the best traditions of science, we have a few important things to get out of the way so we know exactly what we're dealing with here and the limits of our investigation. All the trophies in this investigation are competed for in male leagues. This is not meant to be a statement on the "toughness" or value of women's sport vs men's. It is not a statement that trophies in women's sports are "easier" to win than those in male competition, nor is it a deliberate exclusion of women's sport.

However, the original question is regarding the Stanley Cup, competed for by male hockey players exclusively, and so the comparison is made with comparable competitions in other male leagues. The toughest trophy to win in the world is the one that requires its team be the proven best in its league, face among the most grueling schedules, compete over the longest time period, and face the toughest opposition their competition can offer unfailingly, night after night, in order to win.

Therefore, the teams that win it will have the highest winning percentages, be among the very best in their leagues, and the teams will have to win the highest percentage of games in their competitions and have the narrowest margin for error. The statistics should help us see for which leagues this is the case.

The trophy which has the hardest "winning template" based on the statistics will thus be the "hardest" to win. For a trophy to be the "toughest to win" in the world, we're taking into account many factors, including the effort required to play a sport and the schedule around it, the number of games required and length of time that teams need to perform at a high level in order to win it ie what is required to qualify for the chance to win the trophy, then what you have to do to actually win it, not just "how many wins does it take in the final".

We're also looking at the quality of the opposition you're facing and if this is diluted in any way, and where the competitors for the competition come from. Finally, we're going to look at the games themselves, and try and get an idea of what the "elite" players do in a game.

It's not perfect, due to the varying styles of play and physical demands of each sport, but we shall try. Below, for each competition, are measurements of how the winners have performed and what they've had to do to win the competition. Here's a brief explanation of each heading. For all North American playoffs, it's the overall position in the league for the season in question.

For the UCL, it's the position in the team's domestic league the season before. This will become important, for reasons you'll see shortly. Again, for the North American leagues, it's the total number of games in a given season. For the UCL, it will be the total number of games in two seasons - the reason being that in European football, there are several domestic competitions that run concurrently with the European ones, and teams are competing in several competitions at once.

Whilst not all games played will count towards a specific competition, they will all count towards the wear and tear of the players, which is why we're counting them. For the UCL, it will take into account wins and draws in all games for which points are awarded league games, and UCL group games. Again, for the UCL it will count not just group-stage wins, but also games won in domestic league competition both in qualifying for the UCL and in the season in question.

For the UCL, where knockout rounds are decided on aggregate home-and-away ties, it will measure the number of games not lost i. For the UCL, this will measure the combined percentage of number of league games won in the qualifying season, and then the total percentage of games won in the season in league competition and UCL - we're not considering domestic cup competitions as while they contribute to wear and tear, their results have no bearing on the competitions we're considering in which the competition is won.

Essentially, we want to know what sort of numbers teams need to put up to expect to be in with a good chance of winning this competition. In , the St. Louis Blues got to take their name off of this list after 51 years of never winning a Cup. Here is a list of the longest Cup droughts, with several notable teams and a few that have come agonizingly close on multiple occasions.

Originally coming into the league as the Winnipeg Jets in , the Arizona Coyotes are one of those 11 teams to never win the Stanley Cup. They relocated to Phoenix as the Phoenix Coyotes in , and then in changed the name to the Arizona Coyotes. No matter their location or name though, the team has never even reached the Stanley Cup Final.

Their closest encounter came in the season, the only trip in franchise history to the conference final. In Round 1, they defeated the strong Blackhawks in six games, their first series win since They then defeated the Nashville Predators in five games to reach the third round and the Kings. While they had a great run, the team fell in five games to the eventual Cup champions who ended their year drought in the process.

Goaltender Mike Smith was the main reason the team went as far as they did, posting a 1. Unlike all the aforementioned sports, the NFL postseason is single elimination. One and done. The World Cup happens only once every four years. There are over nations that compete for a spot in the tournament.

Of those plus teams there are only 32 that will qualify to play in the World Cup. If your team is lucky enough to make it into the tournament, just half of the qualifying teams will make it past the initial group stage into the knockout rounds. At that point, like in the NFL, its single elimination. Truly, winning the World Cup is one of the most difficult tasks in all of sports. Every four years the entire globe focuses on this soccer tournament, creating enormous amounts of pressure for the teams involved.

In there was an estimated cumulative audience of The final match was watched by an estimated Starting in when the league expanded to a total of twelve teams, MLB added a second round to its playoffs and called it the League Championship Series. Once again the only other league that can claim the same is the NBA. However the NBA just recently, in the past few years, changed their first round format from five games to seven.

The two teams participating in the Superbowl will have played at the most four total playoff games at the conclusion of the championship. A large amount only play in three games in route to a championship. MLB only has three playoff rounds, consisting of an opening round five game series and two seven game series'. The most one baseball team would have to play is 19 games, just three more than the Stanley Cup Champion's minimum amount of games.

Teams are only allowed to spend In both the MLB and the NBA, teams in the larger market's draw in more crowds, therefore make more money, and attract more of the league's marquee players.