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

TL;DR

This study uses Monte-Carlo simulations to compare different tournament formats for the World Men's Handball Championships, revealing trade-offs between match count, outcome quality, and fairness.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of hybrid tournament designs, highlighting the impact of format choices on fairness and outcome uncertainty, and identifies a potential error in one design.

Findings

The second most frugal format performs nearly as well as the most comprehensive one.

The recent reform increased top teams' chances of winning.

Performance of formats is unaffected by seeding policies or team balance.

Abstract

The 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 error is identified in a particular design. The relative performance of the formats is independent of the seeding rules and the competitive balance of the teams. The recent reform is demonstrated to have increased the probability of winning for the top teams. Our results have useful implications for the organisers of hybrid tournaments.