Combinatorial aspects of construction of competition Dutch Professional Football Leagues
Discrete Applied Mathematics - Special issue: Timetabling and chromatic scheduling
Scheduling the professional soccer leagues of Austria and Germany
Computers and Operations Research
Scheduling the Italian football league: an ILP-based approach
Computers and Operations Research
Maximizing breaks and bounding solutions to the mirrored traveling tournament problem
Discrete Applied Mathematics - Special issue: Traces of the Latin American conference on combinatorics, graphs and applications: a selection of papers from LACGA 2004, Santiago, Chile
The importance of a match in a tournament
Computers and Operations Research
Scheduling the Belgian Soccer League
Interfaces
A method for combining complementary techniques for document image segmentation
Pattern Recognition
Balanced home-away assignments
Discrete Optimization
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In this paper, we give an overview of the competition formats and the schedules used in 25 European soccer competitions for the season 2008---2009. We discuss how competitions decide the league champion, qualification for European tournaments, and relegation. Following Griggs and Rosa (Bull. ICA 18:65---68, 1996), we examine the popularity of the so-called canonical schedule. We investigate the presence of a number of properties related to successive home or successive away matches (breaks) and of symmetry between the various parts of the competition. We introduce the concept of ranking-balancedness, which is particularly useful to decide whether a fair ranking can be made. We also determine how the schedules manage the carry-over effect. We conclude by observing that there is quite some diversity in European soccer schedules, and that current schedules leave room for further optimizing.