💔 The Heartbreak Index

How this board works

Heartbreak = longing + wounds + grind. Longing: for football the headline clock is the major trophy drought, any real silverware stops it, with title and European Cup longing riding on top at half weight, scaled by whether the club can realistically win them in the modern era. For the US majors it is the title drought plus, at half weight, the wait for a finals appearance. All longing matures over a sixty-year fan generation, is discounted by dynasty pedigree and consolations, and fades when a club has not contended within living memory. Wounds are lost finals, near-misses, relegations (habituated for yo-yo clubs, refunded on an immediate bounce-back) and early playoff exits, each multiplied by the hope preceding it, decayed on a 25-year half-life, and healed to 15% once avenged. A runner-up season behind a hegemon (a champion holding five of the last eight titles) counts at 35%: second to PSG or Bayern is the ceiling, not a race lost. Grind is playoff exile and losing streaks.

More rules keep it honest. Afterglow: a club that won its ultimate honour within the last five years is celebrating, not suffering, and for serial domestic champions the ultimate honour is the European one, which is why Benfica still qualify. Local currency: the four US majors weigh equally (to each fanbase, their league is the league), with a heartland bump pricing the Maple Leafs’ wait in Canadian terms. Size of the fanbase: US franchises scale by valuation percentile, football clubs by the weight of the trophy cabinet: the same drought is heavier at Goodison than at a club that never expected to win. Bigness now: football clubs also scale by present stature, from 0.7 to 1.5 times, read from European presence over the last ten seasons, Europe-wide squad value where a club is priced, and the ground a club can fill, so Benfica losing the finals it reaches outweighs a club that no longer competes for the big trophies, and Arsenal’s 2004 to 2025 wait counted for more than a century at Genoa. Relocation: moved franchises inherit their pre-move history at 30%, with San Diego and Los Angeles ruled one Southern California market. Living memory: a football trophy clock stops growing at forty years, so a century at a small club does not outweigh a generation at a big one. Relevance: a college program scales, from 0.4 to 1.3 times, by how often it has made the tournament and won its conference in the last 25 seasons, so two lost finals in the 1940s do not keep Dartmouth beside Purdue.

Coverage is stated honestly: England and the four US majors run the full model including cups and second-tier pain; Scotland, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Portugal run leagues, relegations and European finals; everywhere else only droughts and known finals count for now. Every weight in the formula is a published constant in the dataset itself.

National teams sit on the same board, one row per team and sport, so England’s footballers and cricketers wait separately, and every team the site holds a ledger for is scored, not only past winners: Wales and France in rugby, France in basketball, Puerto Rico at the Classic, England and Italy in the women’s game. Each sport’s ultimate honour weighs like the World Cup, its lost finals with it. The wait shown runs from the last trophy in any competition the sport counts, or from first entry for a team that has never won. Football counts the World Cup and the continental championship (Euros, Copa América, and where the ledger reaches, AFCON, the Asian Cup and the Gold Cup); a nation that has never won waits from its first appearance, faded like a club that has not been near the semi-finals. A continental title consoles the World Cup wait rather than ending it, which is why Uruguay’s six Copas since 1950 keep it well down the board. Cricket counts both World Cups as peers: a title in either restarts both clocks, and the Champions Trophy and the World Test Championship console. Rugby counts the World Cup, consoled lightly by Six Nations and Rugby Championship titles and scaled by how much a nation has invested in the game (caps played, peak ranking), which is how France and Wales sit above Argentina; basketball counts Olympic gold and the World Cup as peers; women’s football counts the World Cup and the Euros, with Olympic gold as consolation, priced at half for the depth of the field. Hegemon: where one nation has won most of the last eight editions and is still winning (the US men at the Olympics), everyone else’s wait and lost finals in that competition count at 35%: second to a dynasty is the ceiling, not heartbreak. Champions stay on the board at the bottom rather than vanishing. Scarcity: a nation plays for its title once in four years, not every season, so each drought and each lost final carries a small cadence premium (four-year tournaments 1.04 times, two-year ones 1.02), calibrated so England’s wait sits beside Toronto’s. Healing: a title in the same sport at equal or higher standing restarts every drought clock in that sport and mostly closes the earlier lost finals, so France’s 2018 World Cup ended its European Championship wait and avenged 2006, while the 2022 final still stands. Semi-final exits are not yet priced for cricket, so South Africa reads lighter than its reputation until that ledger exists.

This is a working preview of the model output. The curated agony layer, the blown leads and bracket-busters, scored in pangs, arrives in a later phase, calibrated so that Syracuse’s 1996 tournament run equals exactly 1.00 pang.