A defence of tanking in sports

ABSTRACT

The sports world has historically rejected the practice of tanking. I argue that this attitude is unwarranted. To do so, I introduce a concept called strategic suboptimal play (SSP), which is the practice of incurring the risk of a short-term competitive disadvantage to increase the chances of gaining a longer-term competitive advantage. Tanking is just an instance of SSP employed in higher-order games, i.e. games that are at least partially played by other games, like tournaments or seasons. Since SSP is integral to every sport, there are currently no easy grounds for rejecting it outright. As such, the same is true of tanking. I will explore some possible reasons why tanking is wrongly thought objectionable, as well as some objections to and implications of my argument for competitive sports more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Tanking
• strategy
• sportsmanship
• competition
• effort

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Drs. Chase Wrenn, Adam Arico, Torin Alter, and the rest of the philosophy department at the University of Alabama for their valuable support and insightful conversations regarding this article. I would especially like to thank Dr. Seth Bordner for his continual encouragement, inspiration, and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Such as in the practice of ‘smurfing’, the videogame equivalent of tanking, that reportedly causes problems when trying to match new players with others at their skill level. See Goulding (2022).

2. I thank a reviewer for arguing this point so persuasively.

3. This is the same phrasing used by the NBA for sanctioning the Dallas Mavericks earlier this year: the organization wanted to lose the game, and the players were not trying to win. See NBA Official (2023).

4. One might question my framing of teams as having a pre-established hierarchical relationship with respect to skill when they have not yet played each other. While there are instances where winning a single game can help illustrate the relative skill of two teams, there are also instances within games that clearly demonstrate the skill gap between opponents even if the end result does not adequately reflect said gap. See Pakaslahti (2016), 284–285 for an example of this.