Scheduling multiple sports leagues with travel distance fairness: An application to argentinean youth football

Abstract

The first division clubs in Argentinean professional football maintain teams in each of six youth leagues, classed by age as major divisions (Under-20, Under-18, Under-17) and minor divisions (Under-16, Under-15, Under-14). Regular season play in these leagues typically follows a single round-robin format; the minor divisions play the same schedule as the majors but with the home-away status of the matches reversed. This setup can give rise to very significant differences in travel distances between the major and minor division teams of a given club, which is a frustrating situation for club officials, coaches, and players alike but almost impossible to avoid with manual season scheduling techniques. Nor are these methods able to take into account any number of other criteria that go into the design of a satisfactory match calendar. This paper reports on models developed using mathematical programming to simultaneously schedule multiple leagues while also meeting a series of other desirable conditions. The central criterion is a better balance in the travel distances of the various teams, pursued through the application of two alternative solution approaches: one based on regional team clusters and the other on explicit analysis of actual distances between the teams' home venues. The solutions generated by these approaches have been used by the organizers of the Argentinean youth leagues to draw up their season schedules since 2018, which has resulted in a series of benefits for all stakeholders.