Abstract
Seeding in tournaments is a process of creating a schedule based on performance in the recent past. It is used in many athletic disciplines to ensure that particularly attractive match ups do not occur until the later stages of the tournament. We exploit the discontinuous nature of the seeding system in the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europa League as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of being seeded. We find no evidence that seeding itself contributes positively to the team’s success in the tournament. This finding is surprising given the substantial drop in average strength of the opponents for seeded teams and in striking opposition to the findings of previous studies.
Highlights
Seeding in tournaments is a process of creating a schedule based on performance in the recent past
Due to the design of the seeding system, this drop is driven by a single team that is drawn from the pot below rather than the pot above, implying a quite substantial difference in the strength of one of the opponents faced during the group stage
In the remainder of this section, we investigate whether this change in opponent strength translates into changes in tournament performance for the marginally seeded team
Summary
Seeding in tournaments is a process of creating a schedule based on performance in the recent past It is used in many athletic disciplines to ensure that . A well studied example from a different discipline is the NCAA’s men’s basketball tournament, where the tournament structure favors teams ranked 10th and 11th over teams ranked 8th and 9th, if they manage to survive the first round (Baumann et al, 2010; Jacobson et al, 2011; Morris and Bokhari, 2012) This tournament design is clearly unfair since some lower seeded teams end up having a higher chance of winning the tournament than their slightly higher seeded competitors (Karpov, 2016)
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