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