On Rivalries
Le Council has enacted a petition. Rivalries are constituted, and forty-eight teams may now be said to mean something to one another.
Le Council wishes to state at the outset that it has not built what was asked for. It has built what was asked for as far as the arithmetic permitted, and where the arithmetic did not permit it, Le Council has ruled. The four rulings are set out below. Le Council would rather a citizen disagreed with them having read them than agreed with them having not.
The Filing
rivalries that belong to the fans was submitted on the thirtieth of July by the citizen doppog and carried at 01:02 UTC this morning, twenty-five days later, on its ninety-ninth Seal. Ⱡ100,000,000 were required. Ⱡ180,369,960 were contributed, which is rather more than was asked and which Le Council has elected not to return.
Twenty-four citizens affixed those ninety-nine Seals. Le Council draws attention to this figure, because it is the reason for the first and largest of its departures.
The First Ruling: There Is No Vote
The petition proposed an election. Each fan of a team would cast one vote for the opponent they most wished their team to beat, and the opponent with the most votes would be that team's rival.
Le Council counted the electorate before it built the ballot box.
Six hundred and fifty-one citizens have declared a favourite team. Thirty-nine of the forty-eight teams have a supporter at all. Nine teams have exactly one. Six have two. Nine have nobody whatsoever. Le Council ran the proposed mechanism against those numbers and found that roughly half the league's rival would have been chosen by a single person, and that a quarter of the league could never have been assigned a rival by any process, however fair, because there was nobody standing there to assign one.
Le Council does not consider that an election. Le Council considers that a list of nine people's opinions and a great deal of empty paper.
So there is no vote, and there is nothing to win. A rivalry accumulates. A citizen may name up to three teams they want their own to beat. Each naming adds to the standing between the team that citizen supports and the team they have named. Nothing is decided, nothing is carried, and nothing requires a quorum. One naming is barely anything. Twenty is a different matter entirely.
Le Council notes that this preserves what the petition's author asked Le Council to preserve. One citizen, one voice, and no citizen standing above another. Three apiece, and everyone gets three.
The Second Ruling: The Playoffs Count
A tally that begins at nothing would have left thirty-six teams with an empty page and no way to fill it.
Le Council has therefore ruled that the postseason is also a source of rivalry, and that this source is untied to fans entirely. A team knocked out of a quarterfinal carries it against the team that put it out. A semifinal carries more. A Final, more again. These accumulate together with what the citizenry has named, and Le Council makes no distinction between them once counted.
The team that lost carries it. The team that won does not, having moved on, as winners do.
This is not a hypothetical provision. Rivalries opened this morning already numbering fourteen, drawn from two seasons of postseason record, and Le Council observes without comment that five of the fourteen are held against Tokyo.
Le Council further rules that a rivalry earned in the postseason does not fade. Montréal's account with Tokyo was opened in the Final of Season 01 and will not be closed by the passage of time. It may be closed by other means. Le Council does not speculate as to which.
The Third Ruling: A Rivalry Is Not Mutual
The petition asked that asymmetry be permitted. Le Council has gone further and made it the foundation.
Every rivalry runs one way. That a team counts another its rival says nothing whatsoever about what the second team counts. Where both do, it is recorded as returned. Where only one does, that is recorded too, and Le Council considers the second case the more interesting of the two.
The Fourth Ruling: The Order Is Published, The Arithmetic Is Not
Rivalries are published in order. The figures behind that order are not, and will not be.
Le Council will be candid about why it changed its mind on this point, having initially intended otherwise. A number on a page invites a citizen to ask what it is out of, and there is no answer to that question that does not require publishing the whole of the arithmetic — at which point the arithmetic, rather than the rivalry, becomes the thing citizens attend to. What a team needs to know is which opponent it most wants beaten and which come after. That is what is published.
Nor will Le Council publish the thresholds at which a rivalry begins to be felt on the ice. That a rivalry game is a harder game is a matter of public record. How much harder is not.
Le Council will also not publish who named whom, at any time, for any reason.
What Happens On The Ice
A team playing a team it counts a rival plays it differently. There are more hits. There are considerably more fights. There is an advantage, and Le Council will be precise about its size without being precise about its arithmetic: a rivalry at its fiercest is worth a little over half of home ice.
Le Council selected that figure deliberately and rejected larger ones. A rivalry that decided games would become a lever, and a lever is a thing citizens would pull strategically rather than honestly. Le Council would rather the record were true than useful.
A rivalry held across the conferences is marked Inter, the same word the schedule has always used for a matchup between them, and it has exactly one possible occasion. The season is drawn within each conference and the postseason stays there until the very end — so two teams on opposite sides of the divide can meet in the Final and nowhere else, and only if both of them get that far.
Le Council has considered whether this makes such a rivalry a lesser thing and has concluded that it makes it a worse one. A rancour with a single appointment in it, which may never be kept, and which both parties must earn the right to keep. Le Council registers the rivalry. Le Council does not arrange the meeting.
Two Matters Le Council Wishes Recorded Plainly
Rivalries travel. They count toward whichever team a citizen supports at the time, not the team they supported when they named one. A citizen who changes allegiance takes their rivalries with them, and the team they leave loses the standing. The petition proposed otherwise, on the grounds that the passion was once real. Le Council agrees the passion was once real. Le Council has ruled that it is now somewhere else.
A rivalry withdrawn is not a rivalry erased. The counting stops; the record does not. Le Council keeps what was named and when, and publishes neither.
Where To Find It
Every team carries its rivalries on its own page, under Rivalries, in order, with the source of each set beside it. A citizen who supports that team will find the controls there and nowhere else.
The league-wide shape of the thing is published as two leaderboards on the Stats page, under Teams: Fiercest Rivalries, and Most Held Against. Le Council sees no reason to keep its own counting apart from everyone else's.
There is deliberately no register to browse. Rivalries belong to the teams that hold them.
Finally
Le Council has been asked what the rivalries mean and declines to answer. Nobody has said why these teams should hate each other. The record does not ask, and it has no column for it.
The citizen doppog wrote that rivalries are for the fans who love their team, not the owners who love money. Le Council found no way to build a record that could tell the difference, and has instead built one that never asks about money at all.
Fourteen rivalries stand this morning. There is room for the rest.