Proactive and reactive strategies for football league timetabling

Abstract Due to unforeseen events (e.g. bad weather conditions), association football league schedules are not necessarily played as they were announced in the beginning of the season. This paper analyses the impact of uncertainty on the quality of football league schedules by examining fifteen seasons of ten major European football leagues. We describe several quality measures, related to breaks, the fairness of the ranking, and cancelled matches. The empirical study reveals that matches that were rescheduled to another date have a profound impact on the quality of the resulting schedule, indicating that football schedules in Europe deal poorly with uncertainty. Moreover, we present several proactive and reactive approaches in order to mitigate this problem. The former determine where to insert so-called catch-up rounds as buffers in the schedule, while the latter reschedule matches to these catch-up rounds when uncertain events occur. We evaluate combinations of proactive and reactive approaches, and provide recommendations to practitioners (e.g. four catch-up rounds usually suffice, and immediate irrevocable rescheduling is not beneficial).