SCHEDULING THE BRAZILIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE MINIMIZING EXTENDED CARRY-OVER EFFECTS ASSOCIATED TO STRENGTH GROUPS

The Brazilian football league is a classical mirrored double round robin tournament with an even number of teams and place constraints. That league is composed of divisions (series) where the two strongest are A and B, in this order. Currently, the Serie A top four teams and the Brazilian Cup winner guarantee together the access to the important Libertadores Cup while the Serie B top four teams guarantee the access to Serie A. We consider a type of carry-over effect that occurs in the schedule when a team meets two teams from either a strong or a weak group in two consecutive rounds. A break occurs when a team plays at home (away) in two consecutive rounds. In this paper, we consider a scheduling problem that limits the number of breaks and minimizes the total number of the effects. We show that previously proposed techniques can be extended to solve this variation. In addition, we use a hypothesis test to provide an evidence that teams from Serie B in last season with access to Serie A at current season form a weak group while teams with access to Libertadores Cup and playing Serie A at the current season form a strong group.