MLB winning percentages tend to cluster around .500, while NFL winning percentages have considerably greater spread.
Explore your favorite teams in a given year and over time: https://sports-index.onrender.com/. Note that the webpage can take over 30 seconds to load.
Code for this project: https://github.com/ethanarsht/sports_index
“The [White Sox will have set a new record for futility, losses… There is beauty in losing, gravitas in losing — lessons to be learned in losing.”
— Will Leitch, New York Magazine
If you’re a sports fan, you know that sinking feeling well -- a particularly stinging loss sending you into hours, or even days, of malaise. After a string of defeats, you may feel like you're the subject of some karmic retribution. You might try to break a curse, or perhaps try sleeping off the disappointment of sports heartbreak. On the other hand, all sports fans know the unmistakable joy of waking up the morning after a big win, reliving every moment of the game in their imagination. However, there’s research that suggests fans feel losses more strongly than the wins.
So which cities have had it worst (and best)? I analyzed the regular seasons (1969-2024) of all teams in the “Big 4” American sports leagues (NBA, NHL, MLB, and NFL) to assess the semi-objective amount of misery or joy experienced by each city’s fans.
While all sports fans have endured some tough losses, some have had it worse than others. In 2024, Chicago teams had a markedly awful run:
To nobody’s surprise, Chicago’s 2024 in sports was abjectly miserable. In fact, a coworker reasonably suggested that it was the worst time to be a fan of any city. However, it was only the second-worst year for any city since 1969.
Comparing records across sports is not entirely straightforward. In the NFL, exceptional teams often win (or lose) nearly every game in a season. Baseball has higher variance in the course of a game, so MLB teams typically achieve higher peaks and lower nadirs -- even the historically hapless 2024 White Sox achieved a winning percentage of .253, higher than the winning percentage of five NFL teams in the same year.
MLB winning percentages tend to cluster around .500, while NFL winning percentages have considerably greater spread.
To further complicate comparisons, the NHL has a point system where teams are assigned two points for a win (regulation or overtime) and one point for an overtime loss. Standings are determined by teams’ point total. For that reason, I evaluated NHL teams by point percentage rather than win percentage.
Fortunately, standard deviation, a relatively simple and old-fashioned statistical technique helps to contextualize individual teams’ records. The standard deviation is the average distance of each point in a dataset from the mean of the dataset. To apply standard deviations to teams’ seasons, I calculated the standard deviation of teams’ winning percentages for every sport in every season. This allowed me to calculate each team’s standard deviations above or below their league’s mean winning percentage for that season. In statistics, these values are known as z-scores.
After normalization, the NFL and MLB have similar distributions, allowing for a more direct comparison.
Comparing cities’ calendar years is also straightforward, as I can sum (or average) the teams in each city for each year. For the purpose of this article, each year includes the NBA and NHL season ending in that year, the MLB season taking place entirely in that year, and NFL season beginning in that year.
Revisiting Chicago’s catastrophic 2024, the teams’ combined Z-Scores add up to the second-worst sports year experienced by any city since at least 1969. Only Detroit in 2020 had a worse year.
None of the 5 teams were above the median record for their respective league, and only the Cubs finished above their league’s mean record.
Let’s take a closer look at the White Sox. Their Z-Score was -3.2 -- an average team would achieve that Z-Score by chance only 7 times in 10,000 seasons!
This was the worst Z-Score in any MLB season since at least 1969 by a significant margin. The second-worst MLB team, the 2003 Tigers, stumbled to a historically poor season of their own in 2003, but still achieved a Z-Score of -2.84.
2024 in Chicago was rough, but not the worst calendar year for any city. That unfortunate title belongs to Detroit, where 2020 in sports looked like this:
The NBA, MLB, and NHL seasons were all curtailed by varying degrees due to the COVID pandemic and associated protective measures. Therefore, any outcomes from that year could reasonably be taken with a grain of salt. Despite that, the results from Detroit’s teams are highly anomalous:
The 2020 Red Wings stand out as the worst performer among the Detroit teams. Their exceptionally low Z-Score is due to the relative success of other teams, creating a large gap between the Red Wings and the rest of the league. The result: no team since 1969 has had a worse Z-Score than the 2020 Red Wings squad.
Despite the lower cumulative Z-Score for Detroit in 2020 than Chicago in 2024, it would be hard to definitively say that Detroit had a worse sports year. As mentioned, all four of the major North American sports leagues had shortened seasons due to COVID. Furthermore, Chicago has two baseball teams, and Chicagoans typically choose to support either the White Sox or the Cubs, but not both. A supporter of the Bulls, Blackhawks, White Sox, and Bears (but not the Cubs!) would have experienced a similarly frustrating year to a Detroit fan in 2020.
Without the Cubs, 2024 Chicago teams’ Z-Scores add up to -6.47, only slightly higher than 2020 Detroit’s -6.51
From left to right, top to bottom: Julius Erving, Tug McGraw, Ron Jaworski, Pete Peeters
Philadelphia is known for passionate sports fans, but its teams have not always enjoyed much success. The Phillies, for instance, have the most losses and fourth-worst winning percentage of all active MLB teams. Yet in 1980, every Philadelphia sports team made it to their league’s championship competition, with the Phillies winning their first ever World Series. It should be no surprise that Philadelphia’s 1980 was the most successful year for any city since 1969 (at least in the regular season). The four Philadelphia teams achieved the following:
All four Philadelphia teams enjoyed unusually successful regular seasons.
The picture changes slightly when considering the average of a city’s teams’ success, rather than their cumulative Z-Score. When using this measure (and excluding cities with only one or two sports teams), the most successful sports season was Houston’s 2018. 1980 in Philadelphia has the second-highest mean success, but the gap is significant.
Houston 2018’s average success (1.5) is the highest of all cities, and comes in above Philadelphia in 1980 (1.4).
Is there “beauty in losing,” as Will Leitch suggests in his review of the 2024 White Sox? I would tend to agree. The rollercoaster of sports fandom requires losing as well as winning, and sometimes, well, those losses pile up. Chicago fans can hold their heads high knowing that one city had it even worse. Detroit fans can be happy that better days have already come -- the Lions are one of the best teams in football and Tigers have the second-best record in baseball (as of June 29th, 2025).
Remember, you can reminisce about your city’s best and worst years using the ‘City Charts’ tab and see a personalized chart of your own sports success using this application. You can see a demonstration here:
Explore your city’s sports history!