Analysis / Second Place Is for Losers

Sometimes, second place is not only for losers, but it's also not even necessarily second place.

This attitude/trope can be justified by the elimination tournament style, that's commonly used in the playoffs of sports leagues. In this style, the teams (or players for individual sports, but we'll go with teams because it's shorter) are first divided into halves, then fourths, and so on depending on how many teams the league wants in the playoffs. The theory is that if you beat one team after the first round, you've proven that you're not only better than that team, but also better than every team they beat, and by consequence better than every team those teams beat, and so on, without having to actually play them. It sounds logical, but following that theory leads to this trope. Since the teams are split in half to start, and only the teams that beat each half face each other in the finals, if your team gets to the finals and you lose, the most you've proven is that you're better than half the teams in the playoffs. It's possible that every single team in the other half that you didn't play is better than you! Which makes it feel, to some, like second place isn't really second. In Olympic sports that use this format, this also explains a bit more of the reason why bronze medal teams feel better than silver medal teams- in the Olympics, the team that wins the finals wins gold, the team that loses the finals gets silver, and then the teams that lost in the semifinals play each other and whichever one wins that game wins bronze. Following the above logic, if you win bronze you've actually proven yourself better than half the teams, just the same as the silver medalists (it's just that half of those teams are in the other half grouping), so getting silver instead of bronze isn't much more of an accomplishment (the only reason it is any more of an accomplishment is that you were good enough to get to the finals and the bronze medal team wasn't).

This is likely part of the reason for the existence of round robin tournaments, in which each team plays each other team, making it easier to see how they stack up in relation to all the others and making second place mean more. Double Elimination Tournaments also push this attitude to 4th Place^note in unmodified brackets, 3rd place when the loser of the Winner's Semi is inserted to the Loser's Bracket prior to the Loser's Semi, because the teams that advances to the Finals had to win one of the 2 brackets to do so.