A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships

Abstract

Wo es auch kein System, keinen Wahrheitsapparat gibt, da gibt es doch eine Wahrheit, und diese wird dann meistens nur durch ein geübtes Urteil und den Takt einer langen Erfahrung gefunden. Gibt also die Geschichte hier keine Formeln, so gibt sie doch hier wieüberall Ubung des Urteils. 1 AbstractThe study aims to compare different designs for the World Men's Handball Championships. This event, organised in every two years, has adopted four hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round-robin stages in recent decades, including a change of design between the two recent championships in 2017 and 2019. They are evaluated under two extremal seeding policies with respect to various outcome measures through Monte-Carlo simulations. We find that the ability to give the first four positions to the strongest teams, as well as the expected quality and outcome uncertainty of the final is not necessarily a monotonic function of the number of matches played: the most frugal format is the second best with respect to these outcome measures, making it a good compromise in an unavoidable trade-off. A possible

How to avoid uncompetitive games? The importance of tie-breaking rules

“…Historical tournament data can provide at most limited conclusions since they represent only a single realisation of several random variables (Scarf et al, 2009). Therefore, we have chosen to use simulations, a standard methodology of analysing and comparing tournament designs (Csató, 2020b(Csató, , 2021bDagaev and Rudyak, 2019;Lasek and Gagolewski, 2018).…”

How can an elimination tournament favor a weaker player?

“…Csató (2018) studies the case of the European Handball Federation Men's Champions League in terms of the expected quality of the matches, its competitive balance, and fairness. Csató (2021) compares different designs for the World Men's Handball Championship by means of Monte Carlo simulation in terms of the ability to give the first four positions to the strongest teams and the expected quality and outcome uncertainty of the final. Dagaev and Rudyak (2019) study the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League in relation to its ability to select the best teams and its competitive balance.…”

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

“…Consequently, draws are not allowed in any match, although it is not a rare event in handball: in the 2017/18 EHF Champions League, there were 10 in group A, 8 in group B (from 56 matches, respectively), as well as 0 in group C and 3 in group D (from 30 matches, respectively). This assumption is also relatively standard in theoretical papers comparing tournament formats (Appleton, 1995;Csató, 2019a;Marchand, 2002;McGarry & Schutz, 1997).…”