A numerical study of tournament structure and seeding policy for the soccer World Cup Finals

By Philip A. Scarf, Muhammad Mat Yusof. 2011

59 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tournament outcome uncertainty depends on: the design of the tournament; and the relative strengths of the competitors – the competitive balance. A tournament design comprises the arrangement of the individual matches, which we call the tournament structure, the seeding policy and the progression rules. In this paper, we investigate the effect of seeding policy for various tournament structures, while taking account of competitive balance. Our methodology uses tournament outcome uncertainty to consider the effect of seeding policy and other design changes. The tournament outcome uncertainty is measured using the tournament outcome characteristic which is the probability Pq,R that a team in the top 100q pre‐tournament rank percentile progresses forward from round R, for all q and R. We use Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the values of this metric. We find that, in general, seeding favours stronger competitors, but that the degree of favouritism varies with the type of seeding. Reseeding after each round favours the strong to the greatest extent. The ideas in the paper are illustrated using the soccer World Cup Finals tournament.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31453918c62dd87f188a2b7ef1eba2a58d8a8de1

Citations in the corpus

• Ranking soccer teams on basis of their current strength: a comparison of maximum likelihood approaches (2017, unknown): “ths and the other for defensive strengths. On the other hand, we can simulate a round-robin tournament with the estimated strength parameters and consider the resulting ranking. We refer the reader toScarf and Yusof (2011) for details about this approach. 8 3 Parameter estimation and model selection”