Professional Leagues

Numerous considerations can play a role when scheduling professional sports leagues. Here is a short selection of requirements that we are familiar with.

  • If police support is needed for your sports event, we can take into account their available capacity and requirements.
  • If venues are not always available, we can make sure that the teams using this venue don’t have a home game at that time.
  • We can schedule the top matches in your competition according to what generates most revenue.
  • We can handle multiple leagues that have dependencies (e.g. team A from one league should not play at home when team B in another league is playing at home).
  • If two teams share the same stadium, we can make sure that they don’t have simultaneous home games.
  • We can minimize the number of times that a team plays two home games (or two away games) in a row, and forbid that any team plays three or more home games (or away games) in a row.
  • In order to increase fairness, we can balance the strength of the opponents that each team faces e.g. in the beginning of the season.
  • We can create a mirrored schedule (= the order of the opponents in the second half of the competition is the same as in the first half, with the home advantage inverted), or schedules that have a given number of days between matches A-B and B-A (but not necessary the same order of opponents).

Our Approach

  • In principle, we can handle any requirement that matters to you. If you can explain it to us, we can include it in our algorithm. Where classic scheduling tools fail, is where the fun starts for us.
  • We also understand that not every requirement is equally important. We let you set the right priorities.
  • You recognize a quality schedule when you see one? We generate a number of schedules that have top quality according to our algorithm, allowing you to pick the best one.
  • What would happen if we schedule match X-Y here? We can explore various alternatives and show you the consequences of certain scheduling choices.

A success story

We have been scheduling the professional leagues for the Belgian Pro League soccer since 2006. This includes the regular competition (16 teams and 8 teams) as well as the play-offs (groups of 6 teams and 4 teams).

In this period, the Pro League saw the revenue from its broadcasting contract increase with 94%. Stadium attendance increased with 17%, and the cost of policing decreased with 24%. At the same time, the transparency of the scheduling process has increased, much to the satisfaction of the teams.

0%
INCREASE IN REVENUE BROADCASTING CONTRACT
0%
INCREASE IN STADIUM ATTENDANCE
0%
DECREASE IN THE COST OF POLICING
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