Towards Prevention of Sportsmen Burnout: Formal Analysis of Sub-Optimal Tournament Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper analyzes sports tournament scheduling to identify unfairness and potential burnout risks for athletes, proposing a fairness measure and a criterion to improve scheduling fairness and athlete well-being.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fairness comparison method and a weighting criterion to evaluate and reduce unfairness in tournament schedules, addressing athlete burnout concerns.

Findings

Identified unfair rest day distribution in a real sports event

Proposed a root mean squared error metric to quantify schedule unfairness

Highlighted the importance of fair scheduling to prevent athlete burnout

Abstract

Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the new sports events pose their own unique set of requirements, and demand novel constraints. Specifically talking of the strictly time bound events, ensuring fairness between the different teams in terms of their rest days, traveling, and the number of successive games they play, becomes a difficult task to resolve, and demands attention. In this work, we present a similar situation with a recently played sports event, where a suboptimal schedule favored some of the sides more than the others. We introduce various competitive parameters to draw a fairness comparison between the sides and propose a weighting criterion to point out the sides that enjoyed this schedule more than the others. Furthermore, we use root mean squared error between an ideal schedule and the actual ones for each side to determine unfairness in the distribution of rest days across their entire schedules. The latter is crucial, since successively playing a large number of games may lead to sportsmen burnout, which must be prevented.