Scheduling the Main Professional Football League of Argentina

Abstract

In this paper, we describe our work in scheduling Argentina’s First Division professional football league, the Superliga. Following existing work in sports scheduling, we develop an integer programming model for the Superliga season schedule and then, solve it using a decomposition approach. Unlike previous work, this scheme is based on the creation and assignment of cluster patterns, which take advantage of the model’s geographically driven handling of sporting fairness. We also model the assignment of matches to specific dates and time slots while simultaneously considering various conditions relating to or imposed by game broadcasters, the government, and international tournament calendars. Our work was implemented to schedule the Superliga’s 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 seasons, achieving clear improvements on a number of criteria over the previous approach.