they don’t play the games on paper

[svetlana14]

In an article named Gone But Not Forgotten there is a reference to the saying "they don’t play the games on paper". Please explain to me the meaning of it in the below context of the artice. Thank you very much.

"Worse, foreign assessments of the United States must consider the possibility that it will soon simply be out of the great-power game altogether. Looked at objectively, the country boasts a colossal economy and commands the world’s most impressive military. But as the old saying about sports teams goes, they don’t play the games on paper, and there are reasons to question whether Washington has the wherewithal to behave as a purposeful actor on the world stage and pursue its long-term interests. The problem is not just that with politics no longer stopping at the water’s edge, U.S. foreign policy could veer unpredictably from administration to administration. It is that the United States is taking on water itself. The country has entered what can only be characterized as an age of unreason, with large swaths of its population embracing wild conspiracy theories. The United States today looks like Athens in the final years of the Peloponnesian War or France in the 1930s: a once strong democracy that has become ragged and vulnerable. France, descending into appeasement, would soon well illustrate that a country consumed by domestic social conflict is not one that will likely be capable of practicing a productive, predictable, or trustworthy foreign policy. "

 

[emsr2d2]

It refers to the fact that any sports team (or individual) can play a game/match in theory (on paper), planning out their winning strategy, but the only important thing is what happens in the actual physical game/match.

 

[jutfrank]

The phrase used here is on paper, which is about how well something is objectively rated in comparison with other members of a set of similar things.

As an example, you could compare the US and Vietnamese military forces during the Vietnam War. The US army had more soldiers, better training, better equipment, and more money, all of which meant that they should have have won the war quickly and easily. If you had looked before the war started at a list of statistics (on paper) directly comparing the two sides, you might have predicted the US to win within a year.

I chose the Vietnam War to show that when we use the phrase on paper, there is usually the suggestion that there are other less obvious factors that should be considered when predicting an outcome such as a the result of a war or sports match. That's also the case here: the US currently has the largest economy and the largest military of all countries in the world but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will continue to be a great power in coming decades because there are other considerations to be made.