In team sports, there is an important distinction between casual (community-level) sports and competitive (professional) sports.

In competitive sports, generally speaking, the goal is to win. Certainly, there can be important losses that help a team reflect, review its weaknesses, and improve on those areas of their play. But in competitive (professional) sports, people are paid to be the best athletes that they can be. Teams usually compete in the top couple of leagues in the country and are striving to be the best. Winning any given game is better for the team than not winning that game; winning the league is better than not winning the league. If a team wins every game (a 100% win rate), they are considered an excellent team and this is considered an outstanding season for the team and the coaching staff. In soccer, this may qualify the team for continental-level tournaments (e.g. the European Champions League) and might lead to the teams’ members being picked for their respective national teams (e.g. for the Olympics and the World Cup). These higher-level tournaments bring new levels of competition, but this is what profesionally athletes typically aim for.

In casual (community-level) sports, things are different. Consider soccer. It is common for casual soccer leagues to be separated into Divisions, and players are assigned to Divisions that roughly represent their skill level. In South Australia, Division 1 players are much more skilled than Division 6 players. Some players (especially in the higher Divisions, like Division 1) might aspire to become semi-professional or professional players. However, the majority of players in the lower Divisions are content to play soccer for fun and have no aspirations to make soccer anything other than an enjoyable hobby.

In South Australia, a team that ends the season in the #1 or #2 position in their Division is promoted to the next-highest Division. For example, the best performing team in Division 5 is promoted to Division 4 for the following year. (There is a similar system of relegation, where the lower-performing teams are relegated to a lower league.)

This presents a bit of a conundrum. Winning is fun—on any given day, most players would prefer to win rather than lose. However, it is possible to win too much. If a team is promoted, they will face much stronger competition next year. This can be demoralising for the team—a strong performer in Division 5 might play the next season in Division 4 and never win a match in that higher Division. None of the players in the team are typically aspiring to play soccer competitively—they just want to have fun and play some quality, well-contested games on their Sundays.

That is, the best possible finish is 3rd place. Under this view, it is not best to win as much as possible. Rather, it is better to win as frequently as possible as long as the team is not placing #1 or #2 in the league. (This is assuming that the top two teams are promoted, which is the case in South Australia—with other promotion systems, the arithmetic would be slightly different.)

In this case, a win rate of 100% is suboptimal. Something closer to 60-75% is better. The exact numbers depend on the numbers of teams, the frequency of draws, and so on. But this is a healthy win rate that is encouraging for the team (“We are winning most of our games!”) while not requiring the team to play in a higher level of competition next season (“We won’t have to play against athletic gods next season!”).