Optimal Tournament Design: Lessons From the Men’s Handball Champions League

This paper challenges the traditional seeding regime of round-robin tournaments that aims to create balanced groups. In particular, the design of the most prestigious European men’s handball club competition is compared to two alternative formats with equally strong groups via simulations. We find that it is possible to increase the quality of all matches played together with raising the uncertainty of outcome, essentially without sacrificing fairness. Our results have useful implications for the governing bodies of major sports.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Journal of Sports Economics

• Publication date

  2018-11-28

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Economics, Political Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/1527002520944442
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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