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.
And the stark, objective, “justified” truth is that my team, Aston Villa, does not deserve its current place in the league table. Villa’s third-place standing should, according to the justice table, be somewhere just under mid-table. Roughly a fifth of the goals we’ve scored can be chalked up to “good luck”, along with about a third of the goals we’ve prevented.
So when Villa was thrashed 4-1 by Arsenal on Dec 31, 2025, some observers nodded sagely and declared that justice had finally been served. Some even used that knowing phrase, "Regression to the mean".
Nevertheless, the stubborn reality is that the team I support is still firmly in the running for a prestigious Champions League qualification. The points are real, not expected. So should I be apologising for cheating justice?
That question about justice, and how confidently we can claim it has been served, has been a topic of discussion in Malaysia in the last week of December 2025. The guilty verdict against former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak in the 1MDB corruption case triggered a wave of contradictory emotions.
Some on social media were filled with a sense that, well, justice had been done. “This victory belongs to those who never stopped believing in justice,” one tweet declared. Another announced that faith in the Malaysian judiciary had been restored. One particularly enthusiastic commentator praised the judge, saying “Dah lah hensem, bijak pulok tuh” (not only handsome, he’s also wise).
I’m pretty sure we all know that a judge’s looks have very little bearing on the quality of his opinions (just look at Simon Cowell), so we can let that one slide. But just because we agree with a verdict, it doesn’t mean that justice was done properly.
For a start, as of writing, the full judgement isn’t out yet. There are questions we should pose. Was all the evidence considered in a balanced way? Was the losing party given a fair hearing? Were key arguments properly heard?
This is, I think, what Najib’s lead counsel, Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, was alluding to when he remarked that this was “probably the first case in my almost 50 years in the law where I lost every single point”, adding that he considered “blunders” had been made.
Whether one agrees with him or not (and you can argue that defence lawyers are obligated to be unhappy with outcomes against them), his response points to something fundamental: the right of appeal.
Appeals are not loopholes or cynical delays designed to frustrate justice. They are a part of justice. They exist because no single judge, no matter how capable, should be the final and unquestioned authority. Justice should not be defined by a single moment or decision. It is a process, built on checks, balances, and the humility to accept that mistakes can happen.
Beyond that, justice isn’t only about what happens in a judge’s mind. It lives in systems, existing in the grinding of institutional gears and the turning of bureaucratic wheels. And systems are judged not by their best one-off moments, but by their consistency.
That’s the point former Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission chief commissioner Latheefa Koya made bluntly on social media: “Criminal justice must be evenly handed out, the law must be equally applied,” she wrote, before adding the uncomfortable observation that “people know this isn’t happening”.
She pointed to high-profile corruption cases involving key government allies that have been dropped (including one where a “tough prosecutor” was also removed) while cases involving those on the other side are, in her words, “pursued relentlessly”. Her conclusion was stark: “Double standards are blatant”.
Catching one very large fish does not clean a polluted river. Why celebrate when entire streams of excrement are allowed to drift past unexamined?
What most Malaysians want to celebrate isn’t the downfall of an individual criminal. It’s the confidence that everyone is treated fairly, regardless of who they know or which seat of power they happen to warm. We want a justice system so consistent and ingrained that we don’t need to celebrate individual victories because fairness has become routine rather than remarkable.
Which brings me back to Aston Villa. One of the criticisms of justice tables is that they miss things that are hard to quantify: effort, resilience, the refusal to accept defeat. In that heavy loss to Arsenal, Villa kept creating chances even when the game was gone. The numbers say the scoreline was fair. The spirit hopefully suggests we can prevail in the long term.
Football fans understand instinctively that performance and outcome aren’t always the same thing. We know luck plays a role, but so do systems, habits, and culture. Justice, like football, can’t be judged by the scoreline of a single game. What is worth celebrating is a willingness to be highly demanding of ourselves, and to keep improving – even when results go against us.
