Referee assignment in the Chilean football league using integer programming and patterns

This article uses integer linear programming to address the referee assignment problem in the First Division of the Chilean professional football league. The proposed approach considers balance in the number of matches each referee must officiate, the frequency of each referee being assigned to a given team, the distance each referee must travel over the course of a season, and the appropriate pairings of referee experience or skill category with the importance of the matches. Two methodologies are studied, one traditional and the other a pattern-based formulation inspired by the home-away patterns for scheduling season match calendars. Both methodologies are tested in real-world and experimental instances, reporting results that improve significantly on the manual assignments. The pattern-based formulation attains major reductions in execution times, solving real instances to optimality in just a few seconds, while the traditional one takes anywhere from several minutes to more than an hour.Fil: Alarcón, Fernando. Universidad de Chile; ChileFil: Duran, Guillermo Alfredo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Cálculo; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Guajardo, Mario. Norwegian School of Economics; Norueg

An instance data repository for the round-robin sports timetabling problem

The sports timetabling problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that consists of creating a timetable that defines against whom, when and where teams play games. This is a complex matter, since real-life sports timetabling applications are typically highly constrained. The vast amount and variety of constraints and the lack of generally accepted benchmark problem instances make that timetable algorithms proposed in the literature are often tested on just one or two specific seasons of the competition under consideration. This is problematic since only a few algorithmic insights are gained. To mitigate this issue, this article provides a problem instance repository containing over 40 different types of instances covering artificial and real-life problem instances. The construction of such a repository is not trivial, since there are dozens of constraints that need to be expressed in a standardized format. For this, our repository relies on RobinX, an XML-supported classification framework. The resulting repository provides a (non-exhaustive) overview of most real-life sports timetabling applications published over the last five decades. For every problem, a short description highlights the most distinguishing characteristics of the problem. The repository is publicly available and will be continuously updated as new instances or better solutions become available

Evaluating Broadcast Strategy: the Case of Australian Football

The central aim this paper is to evaluate the broadcast strategies of Australia's two leading commercial sports, the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL), through a quantitative analysis of television ratings during the period 2007 to 2011. Specifically, the research is focused on assessing the degree of exclusivity and geographic reach embedded within each of the sports broadcast agreements. In doing so, the research considers the impact of strategy in providing value to the broadcasters and teams as well as utility to fans of each league within the framework of Noll’s broadcasting principles

British fair play: sport across diasporas at the BBC World Service

This chapter uses archive material to explore the role of sports broadcasting on the BBC World Service in the twentieth century.Whereas the service's early audiences were expatriate British listeners, the BBC WS recruited different diasporic audiences later into the twentieth century.This chapter looks at specific sports and at the accommodations of the tensions between the WS's links with both Empire and with discourses of impartiaility, which have led to both endurances in the postcolonialist aspects of sport as well as new opportunities for reconfigurations of diaspora

Operations research techniques for scheduling chile's second division soccer league

In this paper, we use operations research (OR) techniques to schedule the Second Division of the Chilean professional soccer league. The solution must satisfy a series of conditions requested by league officials. Because the teams generally travel long distances by bus, geographical restrictions are particularly important. We specify the scheduling problem and solve it using an integer linear programming (ILP) model that defines when and where each match is played, subject to constraints. For the most difficult instances, we formulate a second ILP model that generates home-away patterns and assigns them to the teams; we then run the model, which determines the match schedule. Chilean league officials have successfully used the models to schedule all five Second Division tournaments between 2007 and 2010, replacing the random scheduling methodology that they used previously. Since 2007, the two formulations have been adapted to various formats with which the Second Division has experimented; these include a quadruple round robin and a two-phase tournament with zonal and national phases. The application we present is one of a number of such projects that the authors and their colleagues developed over the past few years, and it represents an expansion of the use of OR techniques for managing tasks in Chilean soccer.Fil: Duran, Guillermo Alfredo. Universidad de Chile; Chile. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas "Luis A. Santaló". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas "Luis A. Santaló"; ArgentinaFil: Guajardo, Mario. NHH Norwegian School of Economics; NoruegaFil: Wolf Yadlin, Rodrigo. Universidad de Chile; Chil

The carryover effect does not influence football results

In a round robin tournament, it is often believed that each team has an effect on its opponent, which carries over to the next game of that opponent. Indeed, if team A plays against team B, and subsequently against team C, A’s performance against C may have been affected by B, and we say that team C receives a carryover effect from B. For instance, if team B is a very strong team, then team A could be exhausted and discouraged after this game, which could benefit its next opponent, team C. Clearly, any schedule will lead to carryover effects. In practice, the perceived influence of carryover effects has been used as an argument when producing a schedule. In this work, we develop an approach to measure whether carryover effects have an influence on the outcome of football matches. The authors apply this method on the highest division in Belgium, using data from over 30 seasons, amounting over 10,000 matches. In our data set, we find no evidence to support the claim that carryover effects affect the results, which has major implications for the sporting community with respect to generating fixtures.status: publishe

Format and schedule proposals for a FIFA World Cup with 12 four-team groups

After the expansion of the FIFA World Cup from 32 to 48 teams starting from the 2026 edition, the initial proposal was to split the 48 national teams into 16 groups of three. Among other drawbacks, this proposal provides potential for collusion. Recently, after widespread criticism, FIFA officials signaled the possibility to re-discuss that proposal, pointing to a tournament with 12 groups of four teams. If this new proposal prevails, relevant questions arise about tournament design and schedule. In this paper, we propose tournament formats for a World Cup with 12 groups of four teams, considering a number of criteria, such as non-collusion, symmetry in rest days, no dead rubbers, and a tournament length of about one month. At the same time, our proposals attempt to adhere to the traditional format, with some nuances either in the group stage or in the knockout stage