THE Los Angeles Dodgers were one of the best teams in Major League Baseball in 2022. They finished the regular season with the best record, having won 111 games with a win percentage of 68.5 per cent. They also had the best record on the road (W54 L27) and their home record of W57, L24, was only matched by the New York Yankees.

Yet they will not be crowned champions in 2022. Their failure, along with that of several other very good teams, to convert regular season prowess into championship success in the playoffs, has led to, or rather revived, a debate on how to decide an overall champion.

It’s a debate that is had across the world of sports, and also applies to football. Which format is the most suitable to decide a champion? Or which is the most entertaining?

A world champion in international football will eventually be decided this winter by a knockout tournament, but preceding that are numerous qualification stages that combine various formats of leagues, round-robins, knockouts, and playoffs.

Most domestic football champions are determined by league play, but the champion of Major League Soccer in North America will this weekend be decided by the winner of a one-off playoff final between Los Angeles FC and Philadelphia Union.

At the same time, MLB is closer to crowning its World Series winner — the overall champion of 2022.

Like the Dodgers, the famous New York Yankees also had a good season of the regular kind. They didn’t quite make it to 100 wins, but the storylines around slugger (big-hitter) Aaron Judge, who eventually broke the American League record for most home runs in a season (after a wait that was almost as entertaining as the act of passing Roger Maris’s record itself) showed the literal power in their ranks.

The Yankees were not the best team in their city this year, though. That accolade belongs to the New York Mets, whose pitching corps impressed in the regular season, especially closer Edwin Diaz who would be subbed on late on in games, walking out to the trumpet-heavy song “Narco” by Australian musician Timmy Trumpet.

The Mets battled it out in the American League with the Atlanta Braves, both finishing the regular season with records of W101, L61, with the Braves edging it on the head-to-head record in games between the two.

None of those teams will be crowned champions in 2022, either.

Instead, the Houston Astros — another team who finished with more than 100 wins in the regular season — the Philadelphia Phillies will contest the World Series to decide the 2022 champion.

The Phillies finished third in the NL East, behind the Mets and the Braves, with a record of W87, L75. Per their regular season record, they were the 11th-best team in MLB in 2022, but have a chance to win it all.

Make no mistake, both fully deserve their place in the final, and both did what they had to do to get there.

But it was the San Diego Padres, with their glorious brown and gold colours, who defeated both the Mets and the Dodgers, before being knocked out by the Phillies in the National League championship series.

The Astros did the same to the Yankees in the American League championship to set up a World Series with the Phillies — a best-of-seven final the Astros currently lead 3-2.

This is a good example of playoff systems in American sports, and indeed cup competitions in any sport around the world, decreasing the predictability of the outcome.

Another example closer to home is that there have been five different FA Cup winners in the last five seasons.

In the Premier League Manchester City look set to be ever more dominant having won four of the previous five titles, but though they are widely considered the best team in the world, they are yet to win the biggest club knockout tournament — the Champions League.

Are playoffs and cup competitions healthy levellers in sports where, usually because they have more money than others, certain teams will always be good across a large sample size of games? Or are they an inaccurate way of deciding who is the best team in any given year?

The answer is that both formats have their merits.

In a sporting world reflecting the real world, where the gap between the richest and poorest is ever-increasing, the remnants of unpredictability offered by postseason playoffs and knockout competitions should be embraced.

There’s increasingly an idea that domestic cups are not as relevant as they used to be. This might be partly to do with the big money involved in league competitions and the extra promotion and coverage that comes with that, but, if anything, in the modern game the cup competitions should be held in higher regard than ever before given they are sports’ bastion of unpredictability.

Last year the domestic cups in Europe’s top five leagues were won not by the usual powerhouses, but by Nantes, Real Betis, Inter, Liverpool, and RB Leipzig. It could be said that Liverpool and Inter are usual powerhouses, but Liverpool’s last FA Cup win was way back in 2006 and Inter’s last Copa Italia win was in 2011. Neither are currently perennial league champions in their respective countries.

The Europa League was won by Eintracht Frankfurt and Roma won the Conference League. Two refreshingly different names on, it has to be said, despite Uefa, two refreshingly different and intriguing continental cups.

Real Madrid maintained some kind of dominance in the Uefa Champions League, but prior to that Europe’s top prize had been won by three different clubs in three years.

At the other end of the scale, leagues like MLS may be taking things too far by crowning the winner of the post-season playoffs the champion for that year, as opposed to the league winners.

This year it just so happens that two teams who could barely be separated during the regular season — Los Angles FC and Philadelphia Union — have reached the playoff final, making it almost a fitting way to decide the overall winner.

But in a usual season, played over a large number of games and, in the end, usually doing a good job of determining the best team overall, there’s an argument that the team with the best record in the league should be celebrated at least as much as the playoff winner. In MLS, as in MLB, this is currently not the case.

At the same time, America’s own domestic cup competition, the US Open Cup, won this year by Orlando City, should also hold much more weight than it does.

After all, it is the only soccer competition in the United States to include teams from lower leagues as well as those from MLS, so there’s an argument for the US Open Cup to be held in even higher regard than the MLS Cup playoffs.

There’s probably a balance to be struck between celebrating the winners in competition formats that do a fair job of determining the best team over a longer period of time and embracing the chaotic, unpredictable nature of knockout competitions and post-season playoffs.

Fans will naturally suggest that the format their team was successful in is the most suitable, and rightly so given how few winners there can be in sports each year.

Debates around which format decides the ultimate champion each season will remain, but each format has its place and its importance.

For this reason, there isn’t really a conclusion as to which is better, but in a league such as MLS that tries to find artificial parity through the enforcing of roster restrictions and salary caps, it feels like the league winners should be celebrated more than they currently are.

In other leagues, such as those in Europe where there is little enforced equity, it feels like we should embrace those cup competitions more than we currently do.

Can we say the Dodgers were the best team in baseball, while also crowning one of the Phillies or the Astros the eventual champion? Given the partisan nature of sports fandom, probably not, as each group will argue their team was the best.

Maybe the debate it creates, the various claims of victory, is just as healthy as retaining the various forms of competition.

Anyway, to the unimportant neutral, this year’s sports winners are surely Aaron Judge, the city of Philadelphia, the Padres’ brown and gold kits, and Edwin Diaz’s trumpet song.