Parity (sports)

In sports, parity refers to when participating teams have roughly equivalent levels of talent. In such a league, the "best" team is not significantly better than the "worst" team. This leads to more competitive contests in which the winner cannot be easily predicted. The opposite condition, which could be considered "disparity" between teams, is a condition in which the elite teams are so much more talented that the lesser teams are hopelessly outmatched.

In team sports, maintaining parity is considered to be essential to maintaining the overall financial performance of such sports. It is widely believed that fans enjoy watching games with uncertain outcomes, and conversely, they will tend to lose interest in a sport when they realize that the vast majority of the games are ending in predictable blowouts. Economists call this idea the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH), and it has been the subject of extensive research in behavioral economics.^[1]