Meet the Expert : “Optimizing Sports Tournament Design”

When? Monday 07 September 2026, 15:00 – 16:30

Where? Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University. Room 1.4, campus Hoveniersberg, Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium (see https://www.ugent.be/eb/nl/contact/plattegronden/grondplan-campus-tweekerken-3d.pdf/view).

What? The Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University is organizing a Meet the Expert event on “Optimizing Sports Tournament Design.” The event will feature presentations by Prof. Sigrid Knust (Universität Osnabrück) and Prof. László Csató (Corvinus University of Budapest); their abstracts can be found below.

While the seminar is open to everyone, we particularly encourage PhD students to attend. Participation is free of charge, thanks to the support of Ghent University's Doctoral Schools.

Abstracts

“Scheduling sports tournaments with different court types” (Sigrid Knust)
We consider a variant of a sports tournament scheduling problem where additionally courts of different types are considered. The goal is to find a schedule for a single round robin tournament where the assignment of court types to the players is balanced. We propose efficient construction methods to obtain optimal solutions for different cases.

“How to design an optimal tournament: Insights from the FIFA World Cup” (Laszlo Csato)

Any sports tournament is governed by various rules that determine the set of contestants, the format, the schedule, the ranking, and the prize allocation. Constructing these rules according to the preferences of decision-makers is called tournament design. This talk aims to give an overview of some issues in tournament design through the example of the FIFA World Cup, one of the most prominent sports competitions around the world. We discuss the basic qualitative methods used to evaluate tournament designs, the Elo rating system and the Poisson match simulation, which is followed by three detailed case studies. The first problem to be addressed is minimising the distortion of the FIFA World Cup draw. The second application focuses on the attractiveness of matches played in the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage. Our third topic is investigating the risk of tanking, the act of deliberately losing a match in order to meet a preferred opponent. Finally, we provide some policy recommendations for FIFA.