In sports, there's usually at least a non-zero chance that the underdog will pull an upset. It can happen, whether through luck, a top performance from a star player, or a fluke play, the fact is, statistically, even the worst teams in sports are more likely to win at least one game a season.
With that said, there are instances of teams that are so bad that every game they play is considered an automatic win for the opposing team. As in, no matter what they do, no matter how good a performance, something will inevitably happen that keeps them winless or at the bottom of the standings, or league table for non-Americans.
A subtrope of Sports Stories. See also Memetic Loser. Can overlap with Save Our Team if the team is in danger of being disbanded. Oftentimes Second Place Is for Losers comes into play. If the team in question has fans who are ride or die, Obsessive Sports Fan comes into play. If they're the protagonists, then they'll (most likely) finally win on screen because Underdogs Never Lose. Also contrast Opposing Sports Team. Contrast Every Year They Fizzle Out for teams that have success, but choke at the worst possible time. Contrast The Benchwarmer for individual players who rarely take the field.
Real-life examples will be limited to multiple seasons of futility so as to prevent oversaturation.
A quick note: this trope, particularly the Real Life section, tends to heavily skew towards American sports due to the Closed League model being the model of preference. European sports, most notably Euro Footy tend to use a Promotion/Relegation system which demotes cellar-dwelling teams to lower leagues. Since a team that would experience that level of futility without being relegated would likely need to win at least a few matches or draw a significant amount, they wouldn't count as perennial losers, but rather just mediocre at best. Obviously, in the case of fictional examples which tend to chronicle individual seasons, there's not enough season-by-season data to justify exclusion.
Examples:
- BNA: Brand New Animal: The Bears baseball team apparently have never won a game ever — people actually go to their games in order to watch the other teams attack them (including the occasional apparent murder) rather than to watch them actually play. Michiru changes this when she joins the team and starts using her Voluntary Shapeshifting powers to win games (growing gorilla arms to throw ultra-high-speed fastballs or cheetah legs to run around the bases, for example).
- Fairy Tail: The titular guild itself suffers from this reputation all across the seven-year Time Skip in the Grand Magic Games. Since most of the guild's strongest members went MIA, its remaining members wind up taking last place every year due to a mix of bad luck and simply not matching up to the other guilds' finest. By the time the missing members return, Fairy Tail has gone from Fiore's rising star to its biggest laughingstock, and the audience only pays them any attention to see how badly they'll perform this year. After a few months of hardcore training and Next-Tier Power Ups, they remind everyone why Fairy Tail was once called the strongest in the kingdom.
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu: The Jindai High rugby team has never won a game in its entire existence. The Absurdly Powerful Student Council sends Sosuke and Kaname to investigate why, lest the Rugby Club be shut down. The two find that all of its members are extremely effeminate tea-drinking sissies who find the act of scrummingnote to be barbaric. They enjoy tossing the ball back and forth while they frolic about the pitch, but that's it. Thanks to Sosuke's Training from Hell, they go From Nobody to Nightmare whose dynasty of ruthlessly brutal cruelty lasted for decades to come.
- Implied in the Pokémon the Series episode introducing Recurring Character and perennial baseball fan Casey. Ash mockingly claims that Casey's preferred team, the Electabuzz, "lose every year to the Magikarp and the Starmies." It says something about how bad this team must be if a team that decided to use Magikarp of all Pokémon as its mascot can constantly beat them.
- Peanuts:
- Charlie Brown's baseball team always loses by absolutely ridiculous scores, with the worst being a 500-0 loss in a 1959 strip. If they ever do win a game, it's because Charlie Brown isn't playing.
- Charlie Brown's favorite player, Joe Shlabotnik, is notorious for bad plays. In one strip, he's mentioned as having been sent down to the minor leagues thanks to a low batting average. In another, the team was Down to the Last Play, and Shlabotnik vowed he was going to hit a home run. The ball popped up instead.
- My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games: The Canterlot High Wondercolts have always lost to their rival, the Crystal Prep Shadowbolts, at the Friendship Games, which occur every four years, due to Crystal Prep being full of ruthless overachievers. Rainbow Dash is determined to make sure Canterlot wins this year and leads a pep rally to encourage the other students, reflecting on how they faced actual magical villains in the previous two films and came out on top, so they can surely handle the Shadowbolts. On the other side, Crystal Prep's Principal Cinch is so determined to keep the Wondercolts as this trope that she manipulates her student, Twilight, into using the magic she's been collecting to win, which backfires spectacularly, causing Cinch to instead concede to a tie to avoid a worse fate.
- Angels in the Outfield (1994): The California Angels are predictable losers. When the main character's Disappeared Dad says that they can be a family again "When the Angels win the pennant," it's meant as the equivalent of "When pigs fly," or "When Hell freezes over."
- Bull Durham: The Durham Bulls are on a long losing streak at the start of the film, to the point where Skip cracks to Maggie that they hardly need the new scoreboard her daddy paid for because they haven't scored a single run all season. They finally start to turn it around when Nuke internalizes Crash and Annie's Don't Think, Feel lessons.
- Grease: In the pep rally scene, Rydell High is said to be in a "seven-season slump".
- The Natural: The New York Knights are a chronically bottom-of-the-division team at the start of the film, and owner-manager Pop Fisher is on the verge of being forced out by the other shareholders because of it. Turns out several players are being bribed by said shareholders to throw games; when Roy Hobbs's streak of home runs starts turning it around, their co-conspirator Memo Paris seduces him and starts drugging him to ruin his performance.
- The Waterboy: The South Central Louisiana State University Mud Dogs football team starts this way before Bobby Boucher becomes their linebacker.
Guy: I don't want that ass on the team. Everybody's gonna laugh at us.
Lyle: Everybody's already laughin' at us. We ain't won a game since 1994. - The World's Greatest Athlete: The movie begins with a college sports coach delivering a locker-room pep talk to three different teams, each implied not to be playing so well. First was to the football team (who unwittingly race into the showers in full uniform, instead of out to the field), then the baseball players (who stumble over the bats on the way to the field), and finally the basketball team (but the game was already over).
- There's a joke where a boy is brought into a courtroom. His parents are going through a divorce, and the judge wants to know which parent the boy wants to live with. The boy says neither because they both beat him. The judge then asks him who he wants to go with. The boy will then say a sports team, usually one notorious for losing, because "they never beat anyone".
- Harry Potter:
- Ron Weasley's favorite Quidditch team is the Chudley Cannons. While the Cannons had success in the past winning 21 titles, their last ever league title was in 1892, and since then they have gone on a remarkably dry spell of bad luck, brutal losing streaks, and horrendous player transfers, to the point that their slogan was changed from "We Shall Conquer" to "Let Us Cross Our Fingers and Hope For The Best". Even Albus Dumbledore doesn't hesitate to make a dig at their futility when explaining his fatal prognosis when he is cursed by Slytherin's ring in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
...death is coming for me as surely as the Chudley Cannons will finish bottom of this year's league.
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: When Harry starts at Hogwarts, Slytherin has been on a winning streak for seven years in the House Cup Tournament, making the other houses this trope. McGonagall is hopeful that adding Quidditch prodigy Harry to the Gryffindor team, even though he is technically too young, will give them an advantage over Slytherin, as Snape has been rubbing their constant losses in her face. The ending seems to set them up to win once again, but subverts it when Dumbledore awards last-minute points to Hermione, Ron, Harry, and Neville for their actions in preventing the theft of the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone that put them in the lead. Even Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff are thrilled at this turn of events, implying their houses were also subject to Unsportsmanlike Gloating from Slytherin.
- Ron Weasley's favorite Quidditch team is the Chudley Cannons. While the Cannons had success in the past winning 21 titles, their last ever league title was in 1892, and since then they have gone on a remarkably dry spell of bad luck, brutal losing streaks, and horrendous player transfers, to the point that their slogan was changed from "We Shall Conquer" to "Let Us Cross Our Fingers and Hope For The Best". Even Albus Dumbledore doesn't hesitate to make a dig at their futility when explaining his fatal prognosis when he is cursed by Slytherin's ring in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
- SOR Losers: The titular South Orange River soccer team is made up of Pathetically Weak, Athletically Challenged nerdy kids who'd managed to avoid being made to play sports up until then. They make no real effort to win, but they also react with indifference to their every loss since they knew it was coming and didn't want to be there in the first place, which not a single adult (from their parents to their teachers) understands (even the Hippie Teacher who told them to "do their best" is infuriated after seeing a game because he didn't think they'd be that bad). Over the course of the story, they score one (1) goal, and that was by accident.
- Bunk'd: "Sore Lou-ser" revolves around Lou and the campers facing off against rival Camp Champion in the Sportsmanship Games, and Camp Kikiwaka is revealed to have a history of always losing every year. During the final egg toss challenge when they are close to winning, Matteo ends up forfeiting to save an unhatched bird's egg from falling and cracking when one of the Champion competitors bumps the tree that the egg's nest was in. Thus Camp Kikiwaka keeps its always losing streak, and Camp Champion is given the victory — until the Champion competitors throw their eggs on the ground which do not break, revealing they were hard-boiled. As a result of cheating, Camp Champion is disqualified, and Kikiwaka wins the games for the first time ever.
- House of Anubis: The students of the school and Anubis House in particular generally suck at sports; while some outliers existed, the actual teams never won. Anubis House specifically had a history of losing every annual sports tournament. In the parts we see, both losing streaks do end up broken, but only with luck and desperation against high odds. The school-wide failure was blamed on the bad luck caused by a missing gem, while Anubis was just shown to lack the skill and coordination that every other house had.
- The Thin Blue Line: Gasforth FC is one of these, until they have a winning streak... caused by their opponents getting food poisoning from their caterer and forfeiting the game.
- Songdrops: "The Cubs Won" says that because of the eponymous victory, Hell has frozen over and pigs are flying, indicating that the Cubs normally never win.
- Damn Yankees: The Washington Senators are Joe Boyd's favorite baseball team, but they've been on a long losing streak to the hated New York Yankees. The team even sings a humorous song about keeping up hope amidst how terrible they are. But all that changes after Joe sells his soul to the devil and joins the Senators to become one of the best players they've ever seen.
- Puffs the Play: The Puffs have come last in the House Cup so many times that their goal is, "Third or nothing!" Part of the theme of the show is that, "Failure is just another form of practice. As long as you never stop trying". During the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Wayne amends this to "First or nothing", determined that the Puffs will take out more Death Buddies than any of the others.
Cedric: The Puffs have come in last place in the House Cup for... ever. But together we are going to change that. This year, we're going to win. Or, we're going to get second. OR, we're going to get third. Third or nothing.
- The Washington Generals
, an exhibition basketball team who existed to be The Rival and the Straight Man team to the Harlem Globetrotters are known for always being beaten by the Globetrotters. One game in 1971 was a massive upset because they won, and they've won only a handful of games in their entire 50-year history. In fact, according to their own website, they have only claimed THREE victories over the Globetrotters since 1952.
- Fallout 4: The Swatting Sultans never won a World Series since 1918. The last occasion for them to win a World Series was October 23, 2077...
- Final Fantasy X: The Besaid Aurochs have a history of losing every blitzball game they're in, and are considered the worst team in Spira. In 23 years, they've never won a single game. This lasts until main character Tidus shows up, as he's considered The Ace of blitzball in his home city of Zanarkand. The Aurochs win their first match against the Al Bhed Psyches, 3-2, and can potentially win the entire tournament if the player wins the title match against the Luca Goers.
- Punch-Out!!:
- Glass Joe has an official record of 1 winnote , 99 losses. This gets upgraded to 100 losses after Little Mac bests him and rematches him in Title Defense mode.
- Super Punch-Out!! features a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Gabby Jay, who sports an identical 1-99 record. His win is over Glass Joe.
- Tokyo Xtreme Racer:
- Rolling Guy, by 2025, have existed for over a decade across various incarnations and line-ups. Since leaving the mountain passes, however, they near immediately rocketed to fame for constantly losing battles at the hands of other racing teams or debuting racers. The few members who have left the team immediately started winning upon doing so, whereas those who joined it from other teams suddenly found themselves beaten down. In spite of it, the team as a whole takes it in stride and continues to race on, having developed a personal philosophy they call "Rolling Spirit" — the combined virtues of staying true to one's values and ideals and constantly getting back up to fight another day.
- When "Manjū Gripper" Toshiya Matsuda founded the Hakone Stalkers, his plan was to create the strongest team of the pass. At the very least, he managed to create one of the most notorious ones due to their constant, never-ending defeats at the hands of other racers. This is due to Toshiya's own low skills behind the wheel: only similarly skilled drivers decided to join him, leading his growth to plateau and creating a never-ending cycle throughout the years that makes sure the Hakone Stalkers will only keep losing.
- Umamusume: Pretty Derby: Haru Urara is known for never having won a race, typically finishing dead last. She doesn't let it bother her.
- Arthur: The Elwood City Grebes baseball team, in the time period between their 1918 championship and their 2005 championship, were seen as this, as they found themselves losing more often than not, partially because of a curse on the team. Even Buster Baxter, who was a diehard fan, found enjoyment in watching how bad they were, even catching a game-losing ball during a game.
- Ballmastrz: 9009: The Leptons are the worst team in the league; the plot of the first season revolves around trying to get them to win a single official match, and they get better in the second season.
- DuckTales (1987): In "Time Teasers", the series introduces a team called the Duckburg Mallards, who aren't very good at baseball. The boys use a new invention of Gyro's to give them an impressive lead before having to leave. At the end, the news report of the game indicates that the Mallards still lost.
- The Fairly OddParents!: The episode "Foul Balled" features Timmy's Little League team, aptly named "The Losers" because they haven't won a game all season. Part of that futility involves Chester, who is considered (And nicknamed) the worst player on the team. In one game, after Timmy reaches on a bunt, Chester ends up foul-tipping a pitch into his braces, which shreds the ball into 27 pieces, caught by the opposing team, thus ending the game.
- Futurama: The New New York Mets are considered the joke of Blernsball, setting marks for futility and having their team motto being "Blernsball how it oughtn't to be". They even sign Leela as a publicity stunt pitcher because her lack of depth perception means that she's likely to hit batters.
- George Shrinks: George ends up becoming a hockey coach for Becky's team, the Storks. The Storks are pitiful in the fact that not only have they never won a game, but they've been blown out each game and have never scored a goal. As George gets a better understanding of the Storks roster and their strengths, he radically overhauls their strategy based on their off-ice behavior, with the final touch being providing their goalie with windshield wipers for her glasses. While the Storks do end up losing their final game, they do end up scoring their first-ever goal.
- The Legend of Korra: While the Future Industries Fire Ferrets were a formidable team with Avatar Korra, Mako, and Bolin, the team subsequently disbanded after the defeat of Amon and the Equalists as Korra continued her Avatar training and Mako joined the Republic City police force. Bolin kept with the team, however it was clear that the replacements were not at the level of their predecessors. At the beginning of the second season, they would set the record for quickest defeat by knockout.
- The Real Ghostbusters: "Night Game" reveals that Winston is a fan of a local team called The Jaguars. The conversation surrounding the invite Winston offers to his various coworkers about attending a game suggest that they're not exactly known for how well they play baseball.
Peter: Your loyalty is admirable, Winston, and I'm sure someday, some distant faraway day, the Jags will actually win a game. And I hope you're there when they do. But not me.
- The Simpsons: Invoked in "Hungry, Hungry Homer" as Howard K. Duff VIII is having the Springfield Isotopes consistently play bad and lose so that fans won't complain when he has them move to Albuquerque.
- In the National Football League, the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the the standard bearers of futility. With a roster that was filled with aging and oft-injured players, an NFL draft class that was devoid of quarterback talent and impact players (except for Hall of Fame defensive lineman Lee Roy Selmon, whom the Buccaneers ironically would pick with their first ever draft choice), a fresh-out-of-college coach who was known more for his soundbites and dismissive attitude than his dedication to football, and a gauntlet of a schedule in their inaugural season, the Buccaneers would lose all fourteen of their first season's games. They failed to score until week 3, and didn't score their first touchdown until week 4. They would be shut out five times during the season as well. That futility would extend to the 1977 season with the Buccaneers only winning one time against an equally hapless New Orleans Saints team during Week 13. The Bucs went in the record books after losing 26 games in a row, which still stands as the longest losing streak in modern NFL history. note
- Baseball: In what was dubbed the "Worst Baseball Game Ever"
, two NCAA Division III baseball programs, Yeshiva University and Lehman College, faced off in a 2025 doubleheader. Of note, both schools were in the midst of historic losing streaks, with Yeshiva having lost 99 straight games and Lehman having lost 42 straight. Lehman would win the first game 7-6, ending their streak while extending Yeshiva's to an unprecedented 100 games, then in the following game, Yeshiva would win 9-5, ending their streak.
- Japanese racehorse Haru Urara was an incredibly popular horse for this reason alone. From her first race in November 1998 to her retirement race in August 2004, Haru Urara had an impressive 0-113 win/loss record. She became a household name in Japan after her 80th loss, being nicknamed "the shining star of losers everywhere" as she continued running despite the stacking losses. This also translated into her character in Umamusume: Pretty Derby as a musume who just enjoyed running despite all of her losses, with fans of the character hoping to get her to win races.
- Major League Baseball has two notable examples involving expansion teams:
- The New York Mets set the modern era record for fewest wins with a 40-120 record note in their inaugural season thanks in part to a weak talent pool in the expansion draft, a lack of free agency, a lack of an amateur draft, and a manager who, while legendary in the past, had last won a championship in 1958. They, however, were beloved by fans for their futility. In their first seven seasons, they would finish at or near the bottom of the National League standings, lose more than 100 games in their first four seasons, and wouldn't have a true homegrown star until 1967 when Tom Seaver won Rookie of the Year. Their first winning season, however, would prove to be one of their best in franchise history as they won 100 games and would win the 1969 World Series in five games.
- The Tampa Bay Devil Rays may have had better luck in signing quality talent as their roster included future Hall of Famers Wade Boggs and Fred McGriff, and they had the benefit of free agency and the draft, but unlike their expansion brethren the Arizona Diamondbacks, they would finish in last place in the American League East nine out of their first ten seasons, and wouldn't experience success until a rebrand to the Tampa Bay Rays and the emergence of homegrown talent in Evan Longoria, Ben Zobrist, Scott Kazmir and David Price helped them win the AL East for the first time in 2008. They would shock the baseball world by making it to the 2008 World Series that year.
- The extremely expensive nature of Formula One means that most winless teams tend to fold or get bought out after a few years. The most iconic, longstanding example in the sport, however, are Minardi. Across 346 races in 21 years, they won a grand total of 38 points, never achieved a podium finish or pole positionnote , and finished last or second-from-last in the championship more often than not, yet were utterly beloved by both fans and fellow competitors for their friendly, laid-back culture and the impressive laundry list of future stars, including two-time champion Fernando Alonso, who began their careers there.
- In one of the few examples of an association football team that can be considered to hold this status, East Stirlingshire were notorious in the 2000s and early-mid 2010s for their consistently awful performances, in particular finishing bottom of the Scottish Football League for five consecutive seasons between 2002 and 2007 by margins of ten or more points, yet survived due to the SFL being a "closed shop" during that time period. In response to complaints about how this gave the club no incentive to improve their performances, the SFL introduced a rule that meant if a team finished bottom two seasons in a row they could be put up for an expulsion vote... only for the league to consistently refuse to enforce this rule, likely due to the chairmen of the other clubs not wanting to let an easy three points go. Eventually, a major league restructuring in 2013 (which conveniently happened right as the club had finished bottom for the second season in a row yet again) saw the introduction of a relegation play-off to the Scottish regional leagues, and fittingly, 2016 saw East Stirlingshire become the first team to lose their league status to it.

