A paradox of tournament seeding

TL;DR

This paper reveals that standard seeding methods in sports tournaments can be unfair, potentially penalizing stronger teams, and proposes a new seeding approach to improve fairness, demonstrated through UEFA Champions League data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel seeding method based on the highest lower-ranked coefficient to ensure incentive compatibility in tournament seeding.

Findings

Standard seeding can be unfair to stronger teams.

The proposed method guarantees incentive compatibility.

Application to UEFA Champions League illustrates effectiveness.

Abstract

We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might potentially punish a team for its better results by having to face stronger opponents on average in the next stage. Major football competitions are revealed to suffer from this weakness. Incentive compatibility can be guaranteed by providing each qualified team with the highest coefficient of all teams that are ranked lower in its qualifying tournament for seeding purposes. Our proposal is illustrated by the 2020/21 UEFA Champions League.