Contradictheory: Celebrate justice – not just the result

Former Malaysian prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak seen in this Dec 22, 2025, photo at the Kuala Lumpur Courts Complex during the hearing of the corruption case in the multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal. The latest verdict, which found him guilty of all charges, created a storm of mixed emotions on social media. — Reuters

In the slightly mathy corners of football fandom, there’s a thing called a “justice table”. It sits alongside the league table and asks a deceptively simple question: Have teams actually deserved the results they got?

Instead of just counting wins and losses, a justice table looks at how many chances a team created, how many it allowed, and how often the ball should have ended up in the net (what football analytics types call “expected goals”). In doing so, it shifts attention away from lucky deflections and unlucky bounces off the woodwork, and towards a “big picture” assessment of who has genuinely been playing well over time.