As the English football season culminates in a number of all-or-nothing matches, the Mighty Spurs are chasing hard for fourth place and Champion’s League football next season for the first time.

So it’s worth remembering what football is really about.

Disappointment.

Most teams are losers. Necessarily.

As I wrote back in 2008:

A neat way to stump your friends is to ask them how many matches (no replays – penalties decide a drawn game) it takes to have a simple knock-out football competition between four teams with one side winning.

"Er," they say, "surely three: two semi-finals get two teams into the final, then one match decides the winner?"

"Bravo!" you say.

Then you ask how many games it takes to organise a knock-out competition of 127 teams so that one winner emerges.

They break out into a cold sweat and eventually give up.

"And to think I thought you were smart", you say. "The answer is 126, of course."

"How come?"

"Because in the competition only one team wins every match it plays, including the final. In this case of 127 teams there must have been 126 teams who lost. Each one including the losing finalist was eliminated in one game only. So there had to be 126 games to knock them all out. Doh!"