Optimal tournament design: lessons from the men's handball Champions League
arXiv:1811.11850 · doi:10.1177/1527002520944442
Abstract
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 result in several uneven matches when the quality of the teams varies greatly. Our paper is the first challenging this classical solution through the example of the men's EHF (European Handball Federation) Champions League, the most prestigious men's handball club competition in Europe, which has used unbalanced groups between the 2015/16 and 2019/20 seasons. Its particular design is compared to an alternative format with equally strong groups, as well as to the previous scheme of the EHF Champions League. We find that it is possible to increase the quality of all matches played together with raising the uncertainty of outcome, essentially without sacrificing fairness. Our results have useful implications for the governing bodies of major sports.
25 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables
References in corpus (3)
Cited by in corpus (5)
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- A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships
- UEFA against the champions? An evaluation of the recent reform of the Champions League qualification
- Tournament design: A review from an operational research perspective
- Bibliometric indices as a measure of performance and competitive balance in the knockout stage of the UEFA Champions League