The rise of illiberal structural and behavioral political cultures prompts communication scholars to consider alternative discursive models for maintaining healthy liberal democracy and promoting productive public deliberation. Our essay offers a novel contribution to that end. We introduce sports tanking as an intentional, systematic, and strategic practice of fielding non-contending athletic teams to lose games in the short-term to improve the chances of winning in the long-term. We analyze a range of mediated discourses to unearth a shared pattern across the rhetoric of sports tanking and liberal democracy marked by four points of formal correspondence: potentiality; pluralism; publicity; and prospectivism. We conclude by discussing the implications of this formal pattern for communication scholars, as well as fans of professional sports and a functioning liberal democracy.
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