Sports League Scheduling with Minitournaments

Abstract

In amateur or youth sports leagues, the teams play all matches during their leisure time. Thus, a schedule with a smaller number of game days is preferred and the teams are willing to partly renounce on the fairness for this by playing minitournaments instead of single matches. In this format, multiple teams meet at one of them and play against each other, reducing the number of necessary game days and required referees at the cost of unevenly distributed home field advantages. The travel times of all teams now depend on their assignment to the respective minitourmanets and the choice of the home team. We present a binary linear optimization model to schedule a sports league as a double Round Robin tournament with minitournaments and most evenly distributed home field advantages, yielding a feasible league schedule with minimal total traveling distances for all teams. After adjusting orbital shrinking to break the occurring symmetries in the possible assignments, we discuss the computational efficiency and evaluate an existing schedule for the „Basketball Senioren Landesliga Brandenburg“ amateur basketball league in Germany.