For the OP, in regards to fairness, could parity be applied?
Because if you wanted to equate fairness to parity, then American Football would most likely be the one that demonstrates “fairness” the most. Other sports that demonstrate parity include curling, lawn bowling, and a few others.
In regards to which sport provides equal opportunity to each participating side, whether it be individual or team, to record a victory, it would be baseball. Each team gets an equal number of outs per inning, in an opportunity to score. After one team has used their offensive talents, the other team gets the same number of outs to meet or beat the offensive output of their opponents. Curling and lawn bowling are equal examples of this.
Personally, I think that the NHL, NBA and MLB are the threee sports that lack the most in parity. When you take a look at who usually has the best records in this league, and then look to the payroll compared to the last place team, you will see that the league’s are rewarding the teams with the biggest pockets.
This isn’t really what I meant by “fair”. For the sake of the debate, assume that all calls are accurate and no favoritism is shown. I was merely considering the game as the rules are written; “fairness” meaning that a typical game accurately reflects the prowess of the particular team.
If you’re looking for a team sport where a single individual has no effect on the result, then look no further that cycling - specifically the team time trial. The teams’ times are taken when the fifth rider crosses the line. The fastest team is always the one which stays together for as long as possible.
For individual sports, either snooker or darts. Both are played indoors, all aspects are carefully regulared and the rules leave minimal room for judgement calls by the referees. Another example may be sumo, although some matches can be won or lost by a single risky move.
I really don’t think there’s any Team sports where chance referee calls, equipment failure or the weather doesn’t influence events. One contender may be team indoor bowls, but it could be argued the home team has the advantage of knowing the playing surface.
In general, a cricket game may turn out to be “unfair” (ex. India-Sri Lanka semi-final 1996 World Cup, Australia-South Africa semi-final 1999 World Cup, both for different reasons.) But, there’s a high chance a particular cricket game is “fair” (where you can guess the result halfway through.)
However, I think the question is meaningless for interactive (mostly team) sports like football, basketball and somewhat applicable for sports that involve mainly parallel non-interactive activities like cycling, running and maybe golf (if I understand the game correctly.)
That’s because I don’t think you can compose a meaningful metric that measures ‘skill’ of a team. Of course, you can somewhat compare individual qualities like ability to tackle a rising short ball in cricket or ability to return a fast serve in tennis. But there’s no way to combine all these quality measures onto a single scale.
I think the OP is closely related to the issue of sample size in clinical studies. If you have a sample of four, then you can’t have much confidence in any differences in the control and the test group. If you have a sample of 14 then your confidence increases, with 40 it gets even better, etc.
If basketball only allowed enough time for 4 or 5 scores then you wouldn’t have much confidence that the best team would win. Even if the Aardvarks beat beat the Zebras 8 to 4 you wouldn’t have much confidence that the Aardvarks would beat the Zebras in a rematch. However if the Aardvarks beat the Zebras 80 to 40 in a longer game with more scoring opportunities then you would have considerable confidence in the results of a rematch.
If that is true then you should be able to test it by comparing rematches between teams in sports with high scoring opportunities like basketball and low scoring opportunities like soccer (football).
I will have to rely on more enthusiastic sports fans than I to gather the data for that study.