In my previous post on Mexico’s playoff system (the Liguilla), I wrote about the percentage of playoff seeds that advanced to the latter stages of the tournament as a function of the criteria for deciding series winners. In this post I’ll analyze the effect of the first-leg result — and the playoff format — on […]
I’ve written about the two-leg format for knockout/playoff matches in soccer on multiple occasions. Most of my writing has focused on the UEFA Champions League and Major League Soccer, but in this post I’ll write about a North American domestic league that has a long experience with playoffs and the two-leg system: the Mexican League. […]
Yavuz, M., Inan, U.H., Figlali, A. "Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues", Computers and Operations Research, 35: 2937-2951, 2008. [Citation][From the abstract] Assignment of referees to football games is an important problem faced in professional football leagues. Despite its importance, the problem has received limited academic attention. This paper presents a model and analysis […]
To continue the previous post, if you are interested in sports scheduling, there are a number of sites that you could visit. First, Michael Trick's website is a treasure trove of information on sports scheduling and the optimization algorithms that are used to solve them. I highly recommend reading the survey papers on round-robin scheduling and […]
K. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, "Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem: A Combined Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Approach", E. Burke and P. Causmaeher (eds.), Springer Lecture notes in Computer Science 2740, 63-77, (2004). [PDF]The traveling tournament problem asks if there exists a competition schedule that allows teams in a league to play each other […]
Last week I wrote about a proportional allocation scheme for the NCAA basketball tournament, drawing on my experience from developing league coefficients for soccer competitions in North America. I'll apply the scheme to soccer by considering how a similar allocation of "at-large" slots might work for the UEFA Champions League. (more…)
This is a soccer-centric blog, and I am to keep it that way, but I also know that a lot of basketball analysts read this site. With that in mind I am going to write about something basketball related that draws upon my experience with developing league coefficients for CONCACAF club competitions in soccer. It's […]
This blog gets a fair amount of traffic from the basketball analytics community, and I thank them for that. I have a few questions for them, and they're motivated by the upcoming MLS playoffs and by previous work on the two-leg playoff series, which is the most widely used playoff format in soccer. Has there […]
Lionel Page and Katie Page, "The second leg home advantage: Evidence from European football cup competitions", Journal of Sports Sciences, 25(14): 1547-1556, 2007. [Scribd]Following up on my discussions of the two-leg competition in football is a very interesting and thorough paper written by British and Australian researchers. I came across it while reading a Wikipedia […]
In my last post on the two-leg format in soccer (MLS Cup Playoffs vs. UEFA Champions League), I determined that in a typical two-leg series, the club hosting the second leg has a 60% chance of winning (3:2 on in betting parlance). I was wondering if that probability held up during each elimination round in […]
