IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/jqsprt/v10y2014i2p11n7.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Larson Jeffrey
  • 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 1-11, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:10:y:2014:i:2:p:11:n:7
    DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2013-0090
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2013-0090
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1515/jqas-2013-0090?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    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.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    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.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David Van Bulck & Dries Goossens & Jo¨rn Scho¨nberger & Mario Guajardo, 2020. "An Instance Data Repository for the Round-robin Sports Timetabling Problem," Management and Labour Studies, XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business Management & Human Resources, vol. 45(2), pages 184-200, May.
    2. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre (Ed.), 2010. "Jahresbericht 2009," Manuskripte aus den Instituten für Betriebswirtschaftslehre der Universität Kiel 650, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre.
    3. Guillermo Durán, 2021. "Sports scheduling and other topics in sports analytics: a survey with special reference to Latin America," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 29(1), pages 125-155, April.
    4. Rodney Fort & James Quirk, 2010. "Optimal Competitive Balance in Single-Game Ticket Sports Leagues," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 11(6), pages 587-601, December.
    5. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Facundo Gutiérrez & Javier Marenco & Denis Sauré & Gonzalo Zamorano, 2021. "Scheduling the Main Professional Football League of Argentina," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 51(5), pages 361-372, September.
    6. Michael J. Fry & Jeffrey W. Ohlmann, 2012. "Introduction to the Special Issue on Analytics in Sports, Part II: Sports Scheduling Applications," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 42(3), pages 229-231, June.
    7. Lee, Travis, 2020. "Competitive Balance in the National Hockey League after Unrestricted Free Agency and the Salary Cap," MPRA Paper 108400, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Fernando Alarcón & Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Jaime Miranda & Hugo Muñoz & Luis Ramírez & Mario Ramírez & Denis Sauré & Matías Siebert & Sebastián Souyris & Andrés Weintraub & Rodrigo Wolf-Yad, 2017. "Operations Research Transforms the Scheduling of Chilean Soccer Leagues and South American World Cup Qualifiers," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 47(1), pages 52-69, February.
    9. Durán, Guillermo & Guajardo, Mario & Sauré, Denis, 2017. "Scheduling the South American Qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup by integer programming," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 262(3), pages 1109-1115.
    10. XiaoGang Che & Brad Humphreys, 2015. "Competition Between Sports Leagues: Theory and Evidence on Rival League Formation in North America," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 46(2), pages 127-143, March.
    11. Christian Ackermann & Felix Hahne & Julia Rieck, 2022. "Matching and Scheduling of Student-Company-Talks for a University IT-Speed Dating Event," SN Operations Research Forum, Springer, vol. 3(3), pages 1-29, September.
    12. Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez & Caroline Elliott & Robert Simmons, 2016. "Substitution between leisure activities: a quasi-natural experiment using sports viewing and cinema attendance," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(40), pages 3848-3860, August.
    13. Stefan Kesenne, 2015. "The Single Entity Status of a Sports League," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 16(8), pages 811-818, December.
    14. van 't Hof, Pim & Post, Gerhard & Briskorn, Dirk, 2009. "Round-robin tournaments with minimum number of breaks and two teams per club," Manuskripte aus den Instituten für Betriebswirtschaftslehre der Universität Kiel 648, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre.
    15. Ahmed Ghoniem & Agha Iqbal Ali & Mohammed Al-Salem & Wael Khallouli, 2017. "Prescriptive analytics for FIFA World Cup lodging capacity planning," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 68(10), pages 1183-1194, October.
    16. Stefan Kesenne, 2009. "The Optimal Size of a Sports League," International Journal of Sport Finance, Fitness Information Technology, vol. 4(4), pages 264-270, November.
    17. Andy Stevens, 2022. "John Blundell's cricket blueprint revisited," Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(1), pages 144-160, February.
    18. Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Facundo Gutiérrez, 2022. "Efficient referee assignment in Argentinean professional basketball leagues using operations research methods," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 316(2), pages 1121-1139, September.
    19. Travis Lee, 2010. "Competitive Balance in the National Football League After the 1993 Collective Bargaining Agreement," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 11(1), pages 77-88, February.
    20. Tasbih Tuffaha & Burak Çavdaroğlu & Tankut Atan, 2023. "Round-robin scheduling with regard to rest differences," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 31(2), pages 269-301, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:10:y:2014:i:2:p:11:n:7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.