Related papers: A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA Wor…
The study aims to compare different designs for the World Men's Handball Championships. This event, organised in every two years, has adopted four hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round-robin stages in recent decades, including a…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
After a long qualifying process packed with surprises (Italy missing out as the reigning European champions) and last minute drama (both Egypt and Peru missed out on penalties), the FIFA World Cup 2022 kicked off on the 20th of November in…
In this work a balanced k-way partitioning problem with weight constraints is defined to model the sports team realignment. Sports teams must be partitioned into a fixed number of groups according to some regulations, where the total…
For the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) introduced an incomplete round-robin format in the Champions League and Europa League, replacing the traditional group stage with a single league table of all 36…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…
Tournament organisers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be strictly better off by exerting a lower effort. However, the European qualification tournaments for recent FIFA soccer World Cups are known to violate this…
We describe a round robin scheduling problem for a competition played in two divisions, motivated by a scheduling problem brought to the second author by a local sports organisation. The first division has teams from 2n clubs, and is played…
The chances to win a football match can be significantly increased if the right tactic is chosen and the behavior of the opposite team is well anticipated. For this reason, every professional football club employs a team of game analysts.…
Recently, UEFA changed the group stage of its international soccer competitions to an incomplete round robin tournament. Previously, teams were divided into groups, each playing a double round robin tournament with a resulting ranking…
We introduce a new measure to capture fairness of a schedule in a single round robin (SRR) tournament when participants are ranked by strength. To prevent distortion of the outcome of an SRR tournament as well as to guarantee equal…
This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and…
Due to the unfavourable climatic conditions in Qatar during summertime, the FIFA World Cup 2022 will be played during on-going seasons of the major European leagues. This study investigates how national teams' tournaments scheduled at such…
We study time scheduling problems with allowed absences as a new kind of graph coloring problem. One may think of a sport tournament where each player (each team) is permitted a certain number $t$ of absences. We then examine how many…
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches.…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…
This paper considers the challenge of designing football group draw mechanisms which have the uniform distribution over all valid draw assignments, but are also entertaining, practical, and transparent. We explain how to simulate the FIFA…