Related papers: When UEFA rules had inspired unfair behavior on th…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition, however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of the…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
In 2000 Allen Schwenk, using a well-known mathematical model of matchplay tournaments in which the probability of one player beating another in a single match is fixed for each pair of players, showed that the classical single-elimination,…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…
Much of modern society is founded on orchestrating institutions that produce social goods by fostering motivated teams, pitting them against each other, and distributing the fruits of the arms races that ensue. However, even when the…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
A paper published in a leading journal of management science has recently analysed the mechanism used for the UEFA Champions League Round of 16 draw. Since the authors have not been familiar with the related sports analytics literature,…
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors that affect match outcomes in such…
We propose utilizing match-level suspense and surprise - which capture the entertainment utility created by competitive balance and outcome uncertainty for sports spectators - as alternative policy targets for league organizers and…
The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
Competitive balance is an important concept for professional sports and one of the key issues that European football has to address in order to ensure its long-term prosperity. However, the quantification of competitive balance is not an…
Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be…
This short note is intended as a "Letter to the Editor" Perspective in order that it serves as a contribution, in view of reaching the physics community caring about rare events and scaling laws and unexpected findings, on a domain of wide…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…