Bench Depth: What the Individual Badminton Rankings Never Tell You

I once mispronounced a national champion's hometown on live television, and realized I had been running in the wrong lane myself.

It happened in 2026, when I was twenty-five, holding a microphone for the first time at the national athletics championship award ceremony at Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta. The junior 100m champion, Lalu Muhammad Zohri, seventeen years old, had just crossed the line in 10.25 seconds. I read out his name, then read his home province wrong. The boy beside me laughed, took the microphone, corrected it himself, and the stands erupted in applause. My face burned. But instead of clinging to the script, I sat down on the stadium steps and asked him about his life. Zohri told me his family was poor, that he trained barefoot on dirt tracks.

A specific human being is always more interesting than any number. I keep that as a professional rule. Today I think about it for a different reason: that day taught me that the most important thing usually sits right beneath people's feet — it is just that nobody bends down to look.

That is true of the running track. And it is strangely true of team badminton.

The context of a team season

Every two years, world badminton enters a phase in which the individual rankings almost lose their value. That is the Thomas Cup and the Uber Cup — the men's and women's team events, where a squad of five matches is placed side by side, and the final result does not depend on who currently owns the world number one. In between sits the Sudirman Cup, the mixed team event, where the order of play can be drawn or arranged, creating a layer of tactics no individual tournament has.

I grew up with evenings when the whole family gathered around the television to watch the Thomas Cup. In Indonesia, badminton is not just a sport. It is part of collective memory, the thing people recall when they want to say who they are. A player like Anthony Sinisuka Ginting or Jonatan Christie stepping onto the court in a team tie does not only represent himself. He represents a memory longer than his own career.

But there is a paradox the broadcasts rarely look straight in the eye: team events are seldom decided by the best name on the ranking list. They are usually decided by the least-mentioned one.

What a fifth match reveals

I learned this way of seeing from another sport. At the 2026 World Cup in Qatar, I was curious why Japan's group-stage goals mostly came from players who entered from the bench. I compiled my own data on substitution timing, physical load and match pressure, then wrote a small analysis. It travelled further than I expected. But what I took away was not about football. It was about this: in team sport, victory is a function of the entire force, not of a single name.

Turning to badminton, the mechanism is even clearer. The Thomas Cup consists of three men's singles and two men's doubles. The Uber Cup consists of three women's singles and two women's doubles. The Sudirman Cup is a mixed event, where a team can present several different line-up options depending on the opponent. That means a team can own the world number one singles player and still lose the other three matches. Conversely, a team with no star in the top tier can still reach the final if its second doubles and third singles are solid enough.

This is the biggest blind spot in badminton media: we devote most of our airtime to the first two positions in the line-up, while the deciding vote usually sits in the fourth and fifth.

Think about how a team tie actually unfolds. The first singles goes on court first, carrying the entire expectation. If the stronger team wins, everything goes as predicted. If the weaker team wins, the whole arena shakes, and the pressure immediately shifts to the other side. But the deciding match is usually the fourth or fifth — where two players who have never been interviewed, never made the front page, must stand in a packed arena and decide the fate of the whole team.

I once watched a men's doubles match in which neither side had a player in the individual world top ten. The score ran to 20-20 in the third game. No statistics table, no analysis video — just two pairs and an arena. That was the moment when the phrase "squad depth" stopped being a cliché and became something very concrete.

Squad depth is not having many stars. It is having many players capable of winning a match they were expected to lose.

Why big teams win, and why they lose

Indonesia is an interesting example. The country's badminton tradition is so thick that a young player can grow up in the shadow of legends without trembling. But precisely because of that tradition, the expectations in singles are equally large. When Indonesia wins the Thomas Cup, people remember the player who scored the decisive point. When Indonesia loses, people usually forget that the defeat came from a position nobody noticed.

Japan has taken a different road. They built a system in which every player, including those outside the main line-up, is trained to understand the team tie as a whole. That is why upsets in team events tend to come from them. Not because they have the best players, but because they have the most players who are "good enough at the same time."

China built something close to a machine. At their peak, they could field two of the world's leading men's singles players and still have one left for the third match. But even a machine has limits: when a generation passes, the gaps at the third and fourth positions appear faster than at number one. Because the number one spot always has someone eager to fill it, while the fourth spot does not.

We tend to read a badminton nation's dominance through its stars. But the real dominance sits in the fourth position — where nobody competes, where the hinge of the whole door is.

This is especially true of doubles pairs. A pair built for a team event is not the same as a pair assembled for an individual tournament. The former needs short-range chemistry, one covering the court, one finishing. The latter needs two individuals at their peak, each able to resolve their own points. The teams that understand this difference tend to have an edge in the second doubles — the match that, according to my own tracking, tends to run longest and end on the tightest margins.

I think back to my story in Qatar. Mbappé did not change football; he merely exposed that football had changed long ago. The same is true of team badminton. An outstanding singles player does not change the Thomas Cup picture. He merely exposes that the picture was already decided by people nobody names.

A counter-intuitive angle

There is a natural reflex I once had and now try to avoid: when a team loses, I look for the player who choked. When a team wins, I look for the player who shone. Both are shortcuts. They teach readers that a team result is the sum of individuals, when the reality is the reverse — individuals are bent by the structure of the team.

The typical strategy in team events is to protect two certain matches, then try to steal one surprise. It sounds reasonable. But it often locks a team into a defensive mindset: placing the best players in the two safe positions instead of launching a bold option that could break the tie open. That is why team events so often produce comebacks — not because the weaker team is better, but because the stronger team tied itself to a safe script.

The empty microphone of the pandemic season taught me that the loudest sound does not come from the speaker. In team badminton, the loudest echo does not come from the first singles. It comes from some small court, when a player nobody bet on scores the final point.

What to carry forward

I no longer believe the individual rankings say much about the strength of a badminton nation. They speak of the peak, not of the foundation. And in team sport, the foundation is what bears the load.

In football, every goal starts from a run — athletics taught me to see that. In badminton, every team title starts from a position nobody wants to stand in. Whoever bends down to look at that position will understand how strong a team — or a badminton team — truly is.

And perhaps the question worth asking is not which team owns the world number one, but which team dares to trust its fifth player before the match has even begun.