Defeating Haikyuu's hidden villain

For those who don’t know, Haikyuu is a manga and anime about volleyball. The basic plot summary is that we follow a team of high school students trying their best to reach the top of volleyball, the national volleyball tournament. In a sense it’s a very pure experience since 90% of the plot is either about training or competing in volleyball.

One of the many things that makes Haikyuu so good is that there are no villain. There are antagonists, sure — volleyball is an antagonistic sport after all, and everyone wants to win — but there are no bad guys, no evil and no tragedy. The feelings conveyed after a tense match isn’t that of defeating a horrible villain, it’s the joy of winning or the sadness of not being strong enough. Neither team is considered evil, nor does anybody else do anything horrible. The arguably worst act anyone performs is to not invite one of the characters to a training camp, and even that event gets its happy ending. All in all there’s very little hatred in the show, just competition against oneself and whomever is on the other side of the net.

The reason for why this works is that the core of Haikyuu, the thing that drives the story forward, is the characters’ innocent desire to continue to play more volleyball. I think this is something fairly unique when it comes to sports media: winning isn’t the primary motivation for the characters, instead it is merely instrumental to their desire to play more (competitive) volleyball. They can’t get enough of that feeling when you blow past the blockers with a spike, when you receive an impossible serve perfectly, or when you fool your opponent with a toss, all in a competitive setting where every point matters. But in order to do that they need to win. In the end it’s only the winners that get to advance in the tournament. It’s only the winners that get to stay on the court.

There’s little to hate your opponent for after all, if they beat you in a fair game of volleyball. It’s the rules, and you weren’t strong enough. Your opponent didn’t do anything wrong by winning. But, there is someone, or rather something, to blame for why you can’t keep playing: the single elimination tournament. It isn’t the players that say you can’t keep playing, it is the rules of the tournament. If you lose you have to step off the court. On top of that, the fact that there are only two tournaments per year becomes another severe limiting factor of how much you get to play.

This of course makes our protagonists want to win even more, but it also reinforces the gap between the weak and the strong. Strong teams win more, and so they get to experience many competitive matches whereas the weak only experience their two losses per year. This is further exacerbated when practice matches are taken into account, because strong teams tend to exclusively practice against other strong teams. Weak teams have to become strong on their own in order to break out of this loop, but strong teams keep their strength together.

The problem is that there are too few competitive matches to be enough for everyone to be satisfied. It’s a scarce resource that concentrate towards the strong. Increasing the number of competitive matches, inducing a bit of inflation, would solve the problem, but doing that is not trivial. It’s a scarcity that comes from the fact that organising tournaments is a heavy task. You have to schedule a lot of matches in a short time span, and few matches can be played in parallel due to limited space and the fact that a single team can only play one match at a time. Additionally, all the teams and staff have to coordinate to be free at the same weekend. Adding a new single elimination tournament will not be easy.

In order to defeat Haikyuu’s scarcity problem it is instead more efficient to look at other tournament formats, in particular the league. In a league all teams play against all other teams and the winner is simply the one that has won the most. Because the matches to be played are predetermined (as opposed to a bracket tournament where the result of the initial matches affect which teams play later on) the need to have all matches be played at the same place is removed. This means that in contrast to a central tournament a league is highly decentralized, matches don’t have to be played at the same place or even at the same time. Organizing the tournament simply consists of setting up a schedule that is spread out over the such that all teams play against each other, which should be a fairly easy task since only one match needs to be played at a time. No big arena needs to be hired since each match can be played at the respective team’s home arena.

With this scheme all teams have equal access to the scarce resource since all teams get to compete the same amount. Strong teams no longer have the overwhelming advantage in experience because every team in the same league play the same number of matches. The need for practice matches gets smaller too since there are so many competitive matches, and you get to play the other strong teams anyways.

It’s not just logistics that is decentralized and improved, there are emotional advantages too. The results of your efforts doesn’t hinge on the performance on a single day, it’s spread out on regular intervals. All that training throughout the year doesn’t have to feel wasted just because you lost the one match that counts. You still have more volleyball to play. You still have more chances to show your abilities.

Of course, a league doesn’t offer as much narrative tension as a bracket tournament with the opportunity to go to the nationals. But the league doesn’t need to replace the current situation, instead the solution is to use it as a tool to increase the overall performance in the prefecture. The league benefits the weaker teams by giving them more experience against stronger opponents, which should in turn benefit the stronger teams since they get stronger competition to train against.

This is how you give people the opportunity to play more volleyball. This is how you defeat Haikyuu’s hidden villain.