This must take an awful lot of complex coordination. How do they manage to do this?
In: 6
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.
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