This must take an awful lot of complex coordination. How do they manage to do this?
In: 6
something like this. they determine how long the season is. they determine how many matches are played each week. they determine who plays who each week, and who is home team and who is away team. the home team picks the match date. the once the season ends, then they go into play offs with the same rules (detemines who plays who, and who picks the match dates). then after the playoffs, they have the championship eliminations.
each week. you have half the league’s team as home (and they pick the match date) playing the away team.
Teams usually have sponsors and local TV deals to get games on specific days of the week on team might push for more games on Sunday and tuesday while others push for Thursday and Saturdays and others Monday and Friday(just mix and match).
With all those availabilities, this can open chances for teams to do road trips with multiple games and home stretches with many teams. Once those obligations are cleared, the remaining games can be scheduled to avoid too many games in a short time, not enough games in a long time and imbalance issues.
There might be 80+ games but there are about 200 days of availability to try and make it fit.
Each league has their own system, but (at least for the ones I know about) nowadays it’s usually done with a computer program. They feed in all the constraints and have the program generate a random schedule that satisfies all of them. The constraints tend to be things like:
* there have to be at least X days between two matches involving the same team, including any previously arranged matches in other competitions
* teams in the same city shouldn’t have a home match on the same day
* a given team shouldn’t have more than X home matches in succession, or more than X away matches in succession
* matches can’t take place on certain days that have existing holidays or events (including local events or expected transport disruption)
* there must be matches at certain specific times that TV broadcasters have already built into their schedules
Sometimes a match has to be postponed part way through the season because something unexpected came up (e.g. there was an earthquake, or all the players got covid). In this case the teams, the league and the broadcasters will usually just negotiate a new date on an ad hoc basis.
Don’t know how it works in American sports because they always have to do things in their own way but for virtually all other sports the league determines the schedule in terms of matchweeks through some kind of draw. This assigns some default day/time to each game (for example, in Portugal this is every Sunday at 4pm).
The teams are then free to reschedule the games as long as both teams are in agreeement. The final scheduling is usually dictated by whoever owns the tv rights to the games.
It’s easier to grasp using a sport with less games played. American football, a team will play each team in their division twice, one at home and one away. The rest of the games are played with the remaining teams in their respective league. Half of those are home and the other half are away games. Throw in a bye week, where the team has the week off.
It’s now mostly computerized, feeding in the necessary games based on league schedule rules — how many games against teams in their division, rest of conference & other conference. There are rules like series being 2-4 games and rest days at least every X days in baseball, number of consecutive days a team can plan in NBA (no more than two, etc.) Then additional rules are provided, like Red Sox have to be home on Patriots Day or league wants top 8 NBA teams playing on Christmas Day. For NBA and NHL there has to be some coordination for dates in shared arenas.
Prior to computerization, it was a manual process that took months. For 25 years, there was a husband/wife team who did the MLB scheduling — there is even an ESPN 30 for 30 about them! http://www.espn.com/30for30/film/_/page/the-schedule-makers
Professional leagues in the US tend to use complex processes ([this video talks about the creation of the NFL schedule](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaVwY3ptryw)). This is because not only they are organized in divisions and conferences (and thus different amount of games between teams), they also have to take into account stadium sharing (NBA and NHL are particularly complex because of this), as well as other local events and TV broadcasting requests. For this, they create multiple schedules, and pick the one they think is better.
Leagues in other places tend to be more simple because the organizers want for every team to play each other the same amount of times. This is called a “round robin” system, and there are some algorithms to create them ([the Wikipedia article includes some of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_tournament#Scheduling_algorithm), they may seem complex but they can be explained easily with pen and paper). They tend to create a basic schedule with placeholder teams (Team A, Team B, etc.), and just draw which team is which.
With a lot of planning.
Ultimately it boils down to a form of sorting/logic puzzle with a set of rules – so each team needs to play each other X amount of times in Y locations, games need to be a set amount of days apart, and occur at certain dates/times and so on.
So you can pick your starting point, and attempt to create a schedule that suits all of these rules by perhaps placing certain fixtures on certain important days and then filling in the blanks around them.
You may get partway through and find that your initial scheme will not satisfy all of the rules because of some reason, so you can backtrack a bit and try and shuffle your schedule to suit, find a different problem, shuffle again and so on – with the hope that eventually you will find a solution that satisfies the rules you have.
The trick nowadays is that while it will be a pretty long and laborious prices for a human to do with own and paper, nowadays we have computers which absolutely excel at performing a lot of repeated simple calculations. So they can easily run through every different combination of teams and schedule in a matter of milliseconds and find the dilutions that satisfy all of the rules.
Latest Answers