Maximising common fixtures in a round robin tournament with two divisions

TL;DR

This paper addresses a scheduling problem in a two-division round robin tournament, maximizing shared fixtures between divisions and ensuring balanced home-away statuses, using combinatorial design techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a method to maximize common fixtures in two-division round robin tournaments with specific constraints, utilizing bipyramidal one-factorisations.

Findings

Maximum common fixtures is 2n^2 - 3n + 4 for n>1.

Construction based on bipyramidal one-factorisation of K_{2n}.

Balanced home-away status achievable in all three round robins.

Abstract

We describe a round robin scheduling problem for a competition played in two divisions, motivated by a scheduling problem brought to the second author by a local sports organisation. The first division has teams from 2n clubs, and is played in a double round robin in which the draw for the second round robin is identical to the first. The second division has teams from two additional clubs, and is played as a single round robin during the first 2n+1 rounds of the first division. We will say that two clubs have a **common fixture** if their teams in division one and two are scheduled to play each other in the same round, and show that for n>1 the maximum possible number of common fixtures is 2n^2 - 3n + 4. Our construction of draws achieving this maximum is based on a bipyramidal one-factorisation of K_{2n}, which represents the draw in division one. Moreover, if we additionally require the home and away status of common fixtures to be the same in both divisions, we show that the draw can be chosen to be balanced in all three round robins.