Abstract
AbstractThe study aims to compare different designs for the World Men's Handball Championships. This event, organized in every two years, has adopted four hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round‐robin stages in recent decades, including a change of design between the two recent championships in 2017 and 2019. They are evaluated under two extremal seeding policies with respect to various outcome measures through Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the ability to give the first four positions to the strongest teams, as well as the expected quality and outcome uncertainty of the final, is not necessarily a monotonic function of the number of matches played: the most frugal format is the second best with respect to these outcome measures, making it a good compromise in an unavoidable trade‐off. A possible error is identified in a particular design. The relative performance of the formats is independent of the seeding rules and the competitive balance of the teams. The recent reform is demonstrated to have increased the probability of winning for the top teams. Our results have useful implications for the organizers of hybrid tournaments.
Highlights
Finding the optimal design of sports tournaments is an important question of scientific research (Szymanski, 2003)
International Transactions in Operational Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Federation of Operational Research Societies
For the comparison of different tournament designs, it is necessary to use simulations as historical data are limited because some formats were applied only once
Summary
Finding the optimal design of sports tournaments is an important question of scientific research (Szymanski, 2003). Csato (2019a) evaluates an alternative of the traditional multistage tournament design through the example of the EHF Champions League, the most prestigious men’s handball club competition in Europe Most of these papers use specific models for simulating match results, we want to avoid the use of such sophisticated assumptions to compare the tournament formats for a number of reasons. We have some surprising findings, for example, the most frugal design in the number of matches played is the second best with respect to efficacy, it seems to be a good compromise in the unavoidable trade-off This is mainly caused by the smaller groups of four teams each instead of six in the first round-robin stage, a suggestion is worth further consideration.
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