Rivalries

At a glance

A citizen may name up to three teams they want their own to beat. The postseason adds standing of its own. Every rivalry runs one way. Only the order is published.

Forty-eight teams may now be said to mean something to one another. Nobody has said why. The record does not ask, and it has no column for it.

How it came to exist

Rivalries were petitioned into existence. rivalries that belong to the fans was filed on 30 July 2026 by the citizen doppog and carried at 01:02 UTC on 24 August, on its ninety-ninth Seal, from twenty-four citizens. Ⱡ100,000,000 were required. Ⱡ180,369,960 were contributed, which Le Council elected not to return.

Le Council enacted it the same morning and departed from it in four places. It set each departure down in writing, on the grounds that it would rather a citizen disagreed having read them than agreed having not.

There is no vote

The petition proposed an election: each team’s fans would vote for the opponent they most wanted beaten. Le Council counted the electorate first. Thirty-nine of the forty-eight teams had a supporter at all. Nine had exactly one. Nine had nobody. Roughly half the league’s rivals would have been chosen by a single person.

So a rivalry accumulates instead. Each naming adds to the standing between the team a citizen supports and the team they named. Nothing is decided, nothing is carried, nothing needs a quorum. One naming is barely anything. Twenty is a different matter.

• Three apiece. Everyone gets three, and nobody gets more.
• Rivalries travel. They count toward whichever team a citizen supports now. Change teams and your namings go with you; the team you left loses the standing.
• Withdrawn is not erased. The counting stops. The record does not.

The postseason counts

A team knocked out of a playoff series carries a rivalry against the team that put it out. A deeper round carries more. This accumulates alongside what citizens have named, and Le Council makes no distinction between the two once counted.

The team that lost carries it. The winner does not, having moved on, as winners do. A rivalry earned in the postseason does not fade. Montréal’s account with Tokyo was opened in the Season 1 Final and will not be closed by the passage of time. Le Council does not speculate on what else might close it.

One way

Every rivalry runs one way. That one team counts another its rival says nothing about what the second team counts. Where both do, the rivalry is marked returned. Le Council considers the other case the more interesting one.

A rivalry across the conferences is marked Inter. It has exactly one possible occasion: the Final, and only if both teams get that far. Le Council has concluded that this makes it not a lesser rivalry but a worse one.

Le Council registers the rivalry. Le Council does not arrange the meeting.

On the ice

A team playing a team it counts a rival plays it differently. More hits. Considerably more fights. An advantage, of a size Le Council gives without the arithmetic: a rivalry at its fiercest is worth a little over half of home ice. Le Council rejected larger figures. A rivalry that decided games would become a lever.

Game pages flag it with a 🩸 line saying who counts whom—and, where it is not returned, that “whatever the visitors feel in return has not become a grudge.”

What is published

• The order. Each team’s page has a Rivalries tab listing its rivals in order—the first marked Rival—with the source beside each: Named by fans, By the playoff record, or both. The controls appear there, and only for that team’s own supporters.
• Two boards on the Stats page, under Teams: Fiercest Rivalries and Most Held Against.

What is not published, at any time, for any reason: the figures behind the order, the thresholds at which a rivalry starts to be felt on the ice, and who named whom.

The record so far

Rivalries opened on 24 August at fourteen, every one inherited from two seasons of playoff record. Five of the fourteen were held against Tokyo. Six days later there were seventy-nine. By then the Tokyo Titans were held against by eleven teams, the most of anyone, with the Medellín Mapaches and the Rimini Rinklers next at six apiece.

See also

• Petitions & consultations—how rivalries came to exist.
• How games happen—what else shapes a result.
• The season cycle—where postseason rivalries are earned.
• The conferences—why an Inter rivalry has one appointment.
• Teams—every team’s Rivalries tab.