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Constructing schedules for sports leagues with divisional and round-robin tournaments

Author

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  • Larson Jeffrey

    (KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Automatic Control, Stockholm, Sweden)

  • Johansson Mikael

    (KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Automatic Control, Stockholm, Sweden)

Abstract

We analyze a sports league that wishes to augment its traditional double round-robin tournament into a longer season. The method for doing so, chosen by the top Swedish handball league Elitserien, is to form two divisions that hold an additional single round-robin tournament to start the season. This format introduces new constraints since pairs of teams in the same division meet three times during the season, while others only meet twice. Though motivated by the concerns of a specific league, the requirements addressed are general enough to be useful for other leagues. We enumerate the number of minimum break home-away pattern sets that satisfy the league’s requirements, not all of which are schedulable. We propose a sequence of increasingly restrictive necessary conditions that remove most of the unschedulable home-away pattern sets from consideration. We lastly discuss the final steps of assigning teams to a schedulable home-away pattern set; such an approach was used to construct the 2013–2014 Elitserien schedule.

Suggested Citation

  • Larson Jeffrey & Johansson Mikael, 2014. "Constructing schedules for sports leagues with divisional and round-robin tournaments," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 10(2), pages 119-129, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:10:y:2014:i:2:p:11:n:7
    DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2013-0090
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Briskorn, Dirk, 2009. "Combinatorial properties of strength groups in round robin tournaments," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 192(3), pages 744-754, February.
    2. Lawrence M. Kahn, 2007. "Sports League Expansion and Consumer Welfare," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 8(2), pages 115-138, May.
    3. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Rodrigo Wolf-Yadlin, 2012. "Operations Research Techniques for Scheduling Chile's Second Division Soccer League," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 273-285, June.
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    Cited by:

    1. Carlsson, Mats & Johansson, Mikael & Larson, Jeffrey, 2017. "Scheduling double round-robin tournaments with divisional play using constraint programming," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 259(3), pages 1180-1190.
    2. Li, Miao & Davari, Morteza & Goossens, Dries, 2023. "Multi-league sports scheduling with different leagues sizes," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 307(1), pages 313-327.

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