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TOURNAMENT DESIGN

Competition formats

The PrOFS project investigated how sports competitions are planned. In this section you will learn more about different types of competition planning, which vulnerabilities make sports competitions susceptible to fraud, and how we can avoid this.

The competition format determines which matches are played during a tournament. There are different competition formats. PrOFS investigated the following competition formats:

knockout (KO)
k round robin (kRR)
Swiss tournament

Want to know more about the different competition formats? Read more!

Competition formats

In a knockout tournament, teams are paired randomly or according to a certain rule. The winners of each match advance to the next round, where they are paired again and play matches. This continues until there is one winner left.

Figure 2 shows a knockout tournament, where all matches are determined by the pairing in the first round. In this example, teams are ranked from strongest (1) to weak

(8), and the competition is set up in such a way that the chance that the strongest teams get to the final is maximized.

Less known is the ‘incomplete’ round robin tournament, also called the Swiss tournament. In a Swiss tournament, teams usually have more potential opponents than matches. The opponents are therefore determined dynamically. Teams in a Swiss tournament all play the same number of matches, but face only some of their opponents. The pairs of teams playing against each other are determined based on their results in the previous matches. A common approach is to pair players with similar previous results. The Swiss tournament is often used in chess.

Swiss tournaments also arise when teams are split into different divisions with opponents paired an unequal number of times based on division. This is common in North American sports competitions, for example.

Tournaments can be played in multiple phases. Typically, only a subset of players are allowed to move on to the next stage, based on their performance in the previous stage. If the formats differ in at least two phases, the tournament is also called hybrid. The FIFA World Cup, with a group stage organized as a single round robin followed by a knockout stage for the best teams, is a common example. In some tournaments, players accumulate points over several stages without being eliminated if they perform poorly in one stage. For example, the Belgian National Football Championship has organized a regular season as a 2-round robin.

Then the points accumulated by each team are halved and the top six teams form a new group, the teams ranked 7-12 form a second group and the remaining teams form the final group. Each group is again organized as a 2-round robin; the winner of the top group becomes the champion. Similar two-phase competition formats are used in other European football competitions.