But building on the green belt breaks that politicians' mantra: the losers shouldn't realise their fate.
The vast majority of the 20,911 crowd stayed behind though, applauding both the winners and losers, an act so admired by Fifa that they set up their Fair Play Award in honour of Dundee United and handed the club the inaugural prize.
Trees on pavements have been the other big losers in the fight for space on Mumbai's roads.
And a party for losers and their friends Labour's perennial risk?
The big losers were the Daily Star Sunday, down more than 14%, and the Sun on Sunday, down more than 12% despite a creditable monthly improvement of more than 5%, again boosted by the paper's ever-successful holidays' offers.
This crisis doesn't call for winners and losers, but for give and take on both sides.
As far as many on the right are concerned, it really doesn't – and if it does, you must be one of those envious losers who hate success.
The Bafta awards, devoted to the year's must-see TV, is almost unwatchable because of the combined tedium of the winners' speeches and the cutaways to the losers trying sportingly to show support.
He described the official "specification report" published for the first time today as giving a "horrifying picture of the impact" with more than 7 million losers: "A pensioner couple in inner London could find themselves paying 22% of their net income in poll tax, whereas a better off couple in the suburbs pay only 1%.
The 1985 cabinet papers show those doubts were fuelled by the combination of dire warnings from the then chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and the then home secretary, Douglas Hurd and by environment department tables of "winners and losers" which showed the devastating impact of a flat-rate poll tax not only on the poor but also on Conservative voters in the English shires.
It is an iron rule of politics that gainers bag the gains and the losers react," says Tony Travers.
