Dries Goossens is an Associate Professor at Ghent University and a member of the Department of Business Informatics and Operations Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. He is the author of more than 60 journal articles, with research interests primarily focused on sports timetabling and fairness aspects of scheduling problems. He serves as the coordinator of the EURO Working Group on OR in Sports and as chair of the MathSport Committee. In addition, Dries is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, the Journal of Sports Analytics, the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, and INFORMS Transactions on Education. Since 2006, he has been responsible for computing the official schedule of the Belgian Pro League soccer competition, in collaboration with Prof. Frits Spieksma and Dr. David Van Bulck, proving that even football chaos can be optimized.

Homepage: https://research.ugent.be/web/person/dries-goossens-0/en

Title: How to measure the uncertainty of a tournament draw: The case of the UEFA Champions League

Abstract

The group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw uncertainty. This simulation-based approach requires generating a high number of random draws to compute the variance of qualifying probabilities for each team. The method is applied to compare draw uncertainty in the former group stage and the current incomplete round-robin league phase of the UEFA Champions League. We also break down the impact of the 2024/25 reform into various components. The new format is found to decrease draw uncertainty; the reduction can mainly be attributed to the inaccurate seeding system used by UEFA. Our results reveal that the primary benefit of an incomplete round-robin tournament compared to the standard group stage lies in the robustness of its draw uncertainty to the seeding of the teams, which is a crucial aspect of fairness.

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15320

Mario Guajardo is a Professor in Operations Research at NHH Norwegian School of Economics. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Chile, and Ph.D. from NHH. His research on sports focuses mainly on league scheduling and referee assignment. Some of his works have been devoted to improve the practice of scheduling in football organizations, including the implementation of solutions for the main leagues of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and the South American Qualifiers to the FIFA World Cup. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, and the International Transactions in Operational Research.

Homepage: https://www.nhh.no/en/employees/faculty/mario-guajardo/

Julien Guyon is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at École nationale des ponts et chaussées, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious French Grandes Écoles, where he holds the BNP Paribas Chair Futures of Quantitative Finance, and a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Finance and Risk Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. A big soccer fan, Julien has published articles on fairness in sports both in academic journals and in top-tier newspapers including The New York Times, The Times, Le Monde, and El País. Some of his suggestions for draws and tournament design have been adopted by FIFA and UEFA, including a new, fairer draw method for the FIFA World Cup (since 2018); a fairer format for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (adopted in March 2023); a new knockout bracket for the UEFA Euro (since 2020); the draw method for the league phase of the UEFA Champions League, and an optimized schedule of the UEFA Champions League. His paper "Risk of collusion: Will groups of 3 ruin the FIFA World Cup?" won the 2nd prize at the 2021 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the biggest sports analytics event in the world.

Homepage: https://cermics.enpc.fr/~guyon//

Ruud Koning is a sports economist from The Netherlands. He has published in different journals, and edited a number of reference books on sport economics. His main interest is the intersection of sport economics, econometrics and statistics.

Homepage: https://www.rug.nl/staff/r.h.koning/

Title: Where to start?

Abstract

Long track speed skating is an established feature of Winter Olympic Games. Skaters skate in separate lanes, and change lane very time the pass the crossing straight. Even though skaters race in pairs, the final ranking is based on the time skated of all participants. Hence, an individual skater competes with the whole field of participants. Even though they perform under the same circumstances, they start in different lanes. Especially on the 1000m this may matter, as one skater has three inner turns and two outer turns, and the other skater has two inner turns and three outer turns. This asymmetry may cause a competitive advantage. In this contribution I zoom in on this difference, taking the rules that determine assignment to the starting lane into account.

Michael A. Lapré is an Associate Professor of Operations Management and Parker Family Faculty Fellow at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. His research interests focus on organizational learning, learning curves, sports analytics, and competitive balance in sports. His industry studies include steel-cord manufacturing, airlines, Formula One racing, the FIFA World Cup, the UEFA Euro, and the National Football League. He currently serves as a senior editor for Production and Operations Management and an associate editor for Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. His research has appeared in Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, and Journal of Sports Economics, among others.

Homepage: https://business.vanderbilt.edu/bio/michael-lapre/

Title: The impact of FA Cup schedule fatigue in the UEFA Champions League 2003–2024

Abstract

England is the only top soccer country in Europe with two domestic cup competitions, the League Cup and the FA Cup. We study whether this more congested schedule affects performance of the English teams in the UEFA Champions League (CL), the most prestigious European competition for soccer clubs. Between the 2003/04 and 2023/24 seasons, the CL used a stable format: a group stage with eight groups of four teams each, followed by a knockout stage. This era provides a rich history and sufficient data to study our research question. We show that the second domestic cup competition in England creates schedule fatigue, which is handicapping their teams involved in the CL. We find that for English teams involved in the CL playing two instead of three FA Cup games from January to early March increases the probability of reaching the CL quarterfinals from 0.50 to 0.69. We propose several policy recommendations for the FA Cup.

F. Javier López is a Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at University of Zaragoza, Spain. His research interests include stochastic processes, extreme value theory, inventory systems and the application of operations research to the design and analysis of tournaments. He has published around 50 articles on these topics in journals such as Annals of Applied Probability, Stochastic Processes and their Applications, European Journal of Operational Research, and Annals of Operations Research.

Homepage: https://sideral.unizar.es/sideral/CV/francisco-javier-lopez-lorente

Title: Balanced group draws in Sports Tournaments

Abstract

The draw used by FIFA for the group stage of the World Cup has repeatedly produced imbalanced groups, with some containing significantly stronger teams than others. Such imbalances may affect teams’ probabilities of advancing and are widely perceived as unfair. We present draw procedures that ensure all groups have (virtually) identical competitive levels, where group strength is defined as the sum of its teams' strengths. Our framework applies to tournaments with groups of size three or four and incorporates the usual seeding and geographical constraints. We proceed in two stages. First, we identify all balanced groupings satisfying the structural constraints. This step is computationally demanding: among roughly 1035 possible allocations, only about 109 satisfy the balance and structural conditions. Commercial software cannot handle this enumeration problem in a reasonable amount of time. We therefore develop efficient algorithms combining mathematical bounds with a progressive reduction of the search space through ordering and pruning. Second, we implement pot-and-ball draw procedures that select a solution from the set of balanced groupings, preserving transparency and compatibility with live broadcast formats.

Mehmet Mars Seven is a lecturer in economics at King’s College London and has a diverse academic background. He holds a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University; during this time, he had the opportunity to work with game theorist and political scientist Steven Brams at New York University. Beyond academia, Mehmet is a chess enthusiast and leads the Game Theory Corner at Norway Chess. He is also a former professional backgammon player. His passion for games goes much further than just playing; he is intrigued by the multifaceted world of games and sports, exploring everything from theoretical foundations to practical applications.

Homepage: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mehmet-ismail

Title: Measuring performance and designing fair tournaments: Applications to chess

Abstract

A long-standing limitation of Elo-based performance ratings is the inability to assign meaningful ratings in tournaments where players achieve perfect scores. I will introduce the Complete Performance Rating, an alternative to the standard Tournament Performance Rating that is well-defined for every possible outcome. Building on this, I will define the Performance Rating Equilibrium (PRE), a new rating concept in which players’ ratings exactly predict their tournament results: if taken as initial ratings, no player’s rating would change after the event. Formally, PREs are fixed points of a multidimensional rating function; we establish their existence under mild conditions.

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19006

Tim Pawlowski is a professor of sport economics at the University of Tübingen. He is co-founder of the Data Science and Sports Lab and currently serves as elected Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. His work was supported by research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), UEFA, and FIFA. He was principal investigator in research projects conducted on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Federal Institute for Sports Science, and Major League Soccer, and served as a guest speaker invited by institutions, such as the Council of the European Union, the Sports Committee of the German National Parliament, or UNICEF, as well as different clubs, leagues, and associations.

Homepage: https://www.tim-pawlowski.de/

Title: Trimming of extreme votes and favoritism: Evidence from the field

Abstract

Despite a large body of theoretical literature on voting mechanisms, there is no documented evidence from real-world panel evaluations about the effect of trimming the extreme votes on sincere voting. We provide the first such evidence by comparing subjective evaluations of experts from different countries in competitive settings with and without a trimming mechanism. In these evaluations, some of the evaluated subjects are experts' compatriots. Using data on 29,383 subjective evaluations, we find that experts assign significantly higher scores to their compatriots in panels without trimming. However, in panels with trimming, this favoritism is generally insignificant.

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05542

Juan De Dios Tena Horrillo is senior lecturer in Sports Business and Management at the University of Liverpool Management School. His research focuses on the econometric analysis of sports behaviour, including competitive balance, managerial decisions, and the effects of rule changes in football. He has held academic positions in Spain, Italy, Chile, and Israel, and his works have been published in leading journals in sports economics and applied econometrics.

Homepage: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/juan-de-dios-tena-horrillo

Title: Young players, regulations, and market dynamics in European football

Abstract

This keynote presents evidence on how professional football clubs use and develop young players, and how regulatory interventions shape these decisions. The presentation combines two complementary research projects. The first analyses player utilisation patterns across European leagues, examining how clubs allocate playing time between younger and more experienced players under varying competitive and organisational conditions, and identifying the strategic and performance-related factors associated with youth deployment. The second evaluates the effects of Poland’s Youth Player Rule, a policy designed to increase opportunities for domestic under-22 players. Using a difference-in-differences framework with cross-country controls, the study quantifies how the regulation affected squad composition, minutes played, and related market outcomes, distinguishing between periods of stricter and softer enforcement. Together, these studies provide new empirical insights into youth development, organisational decision-making, and the behavioural responses of clubs to policy constraints in professional football.

Link to the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5730424

Jan C. van Ours is emeritus professor of Economics at Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands and adjunct professor at the Center for Health Economics, Monash Business School, Melbourne, Australia. Currently, his research is focused on labour economics, health economics and sports economics.

Homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/homepagejanvanours/

Title: Performing under Pressure: Revisiting Penalty Shootouts

Abstract

A penalty shootout is a sequence of penalty kicks, i.e. 11 meters (12 yards) shots on goal with only the goalkeeper of the opposing team to prevent scoring. Penalty shootouts in professional football are interesting to study for various reasons. There is the question of whether or not ability matters. It could be that scoring a penalty is just a matter of luck. Furthermore, a first-mover advantage may or may not be important. Then, there is the question whether psychological pressure affects the outcome of an individual penalty attempt. Finally, there is the issue of whether the sequence in which a penalty shootout is organized matters. The current talk addresses all these issues in an analysis of penalty shootouts in Dutch professional football cup matches. We use data from about six decades finding that ability is not very important, there is evidence of a first-mover advantage, whereas under pressure penalty attempts are more likely to fail.

Sten Wessel is a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. His supervisor is Prof. Frits Spieksma, the current President of EURO (The Association of European Operational Research Societies). In his research, he specializes in fairness in combinational optimization, with a particular interest in fairness in sports scheduling and competition design. Also active within sports, he is an international official scorer for baseball and softball. Furthermore, he is a member of the playing rules committee and protest committee of the Royal Dutch Baseball and Softball Federation.

Homepage: https://stenwessel.nl

Title: Fair incomplete round-robin tournaments

Abstract

Round-robin tournaments are a popular way of organizing competitions, but often it is not possible that teams play against all other teams, as this would require too many matches to be played. A variant of round-robin tournaments has been introduced that can remedy this, the incomplete round robin (iRR), where it is still the case that every team plays the same number of matches, however, not against all other teams. When not all teams face the same set of opponents, and assuming there is variance in the strength of the teams, the question arises: is the iRR fair? We consider the fairness of a draw for an iRR by analyzing the difference between the strongest and weakest opponent set of every team. We theoretically analyze the computational complexity of the question: does there exist a fair iRR draw where every team faces an opponent set with equal average strength? We computationally analyze both real-world and generated instances where we minimize the difference between the strongest and weakest opponent set.