I think you are confusing "the best team winning" with everybody knowing who is going to win a priori. If the game goes to the best player with near certainty,

I think you are confusing "the best team winning" with everybody knowing who is going to win a priori. If the game goes to the best player with near certainty, then unless there's a lot of noise in determining the best player beforehand, you will have comparable certainty about who will win. Sprinting, marathoning, horse racing, downhill skiing, etc., they all determine pretty clearly who won, and they do a good job to varying degrees of seeming fair. Determining clearly who won is not the issue --- it is, after all, very easy to tell who won a soccer game. What is at issue is determining who is best. I don't find these examples convincing in that regard. We could do a better job at identifying the top sprinter by looking at performance over multiple races, instead of one race; this would make us less sensitive to things like stumbles, bad starts, etc. I don't think that doing things in this way (Olympic best of 15 100m contests!) would actually be more exciting, though. Soccer could be a better game, but I get it, you don't like change. Um, ok?