Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-67.70.92.41-20151228204640/@comment-71.225.146.39-20160222213309

 You are correct that until a creator, like Miles, or Mercury himself says he threw it or did not there will be no definitive answer. Almost all of the evidence does point to Mercury throwing that fight though.



 The first is that there was clearly a plan to have Yang attack Merc already set-up (yes obvious but being thorough here). Ep 7 even said the plan went smoothly with Merc losing, while it is not confirmation, it is a strong implication towards Mercury planning to lose. You are correct that any sort of unsportsmanlike conduct would affect the crowd; however, the plan was to call Grimm so the stronger emotions are necessary in order to call them so the bigger the offense the better. Between permanently crippling a fighter versus and just being a bad sport the former is going to cause many more visceral, and more importantly Grimm attracting, reactions. So for there to be that reaction, Yang would have to attack someone while there aura is gone. That means Mercury cannot win for the plan to be as effective as possible.



 Him losing and being actually crippled would be a reason that he might not have lost on purpose except for ep 7, again, confirming that his metal legs only took minor easily repaired damage that didn't even keep him but for a day or two and that he was expecting the attack to his leg already. Otherwise, if he was surprised he wouldn't have been making jokes about never walking again and the lack of surprise about Cinder setting him up to be kneecapped.



 You are also making assumptions that Mercury did not know Yang's semblance something season two clearly showed him and the entire team tracking down important fighters and discovering their semblances. He also isn't shocked when Ruby uses superspeed in the tunnels, since he was able to easily counter her first attempt.



 The rest of the points talked about above by other posters, ignoring the lack of a buzzer, not really attempting to fight back once Yang went Super, not checking the scoreboard, etc. could all be explained away if you really tried hard enough, but Occam's razor and the rest of the outlying context all point to Mercury losing the fight on purpose.



 tl;dr: While not confrimed it is heavily implied that Merc lost on purpose or at least didn't try that hard during the fight.