In the European section of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification, 13 national teams, which are members of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), can qualify for the final competition. The 54 teams are divided into nine groups to play home-and-away round-robin matches in 10...

A cikk a labdarúgásban alkalmazott rangsorolási szabályok problémáit tárgyalja. Néhány vitát generáló mérkőzés felidézése mellett bemutatjuk a 2018-as labdarúgó-világbajnokság európai selejtezőjének manipulálhatóságát: 2017 októberében, a mérkőzések...

The study aims to compare different designs for the World Men’s Handball Championships. This event, organized 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...

Egy sportverseny szabályaival szemben alapvető követelmény a minél jobb teljesítmény elérésére ösztönzés. Ez a követelmény sérül, ha a múltban eredményesebb csapatok hátrányosabb helyzetből indulnak. A tanulmány a 2020-as labdarúgó-Európa-bajnokság selejtezőjét...

Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be fairer than the simpler deterministic Alternating (ABBA)...

Fairness has several interpretations in sports, one of them being that the rules should guarantee incentive compatibility, namely, a team cannot beworse off due to better results in any feasible scenario. The current seeding regime of the most prestigious annual European club football...

This article investigates the qualification for the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League (CL), the most prestigious club competition in European football, with respect to the theoretical property of strategyproofness. We find that in three seasons (2015-2016, 2016-2017,...

The paper evaluates the impact of the only reform in the Champions Path of UEFA Champions League qualifying system, effective from the 2018/19 season. In contrast to previous studies, our methodology considers five seasons instead of only one to filter out any possible season-specific...

For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic literature, that is, the rules are proved to be either...

The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used in handball and other sports, are shown to be incentive...