Volume 20, Issue 2

We propose an alternative design for tournaments that use a preliminary stage, followed by several rounds of single elimination play. The conventional “bracket” design of these tournaments suffers from several deficiencies. Specifically, various reasonable performance criteria for the tournament are not satisfied, there is an unnecessary element of luck in the matchups of players, and there are situations where players have an incentive to shirk. To address all these issues, we allow higher ranked players at the single elimination stage to choose their next opponent sequentially at each round. We allow each player’s ranking either to remain static, or to improve by beating a higher ranked player (Guyon, J. 2022. “Choose your opponent”: a new knockout design for hybrid tournaments. J. Sports Anal . 8: 9–29). Using data from 2215 men’s professional tennis tournaments from 1991 to 2017, we demonstrate the reasonableness of the results obtained. We also perform sensitivity analysis for the effect of increasing irregularity in the pairwise win probability matrix on three traditional performance measures. Finally, we consider strategic shirking behavior at both the individual and group levels, and show how our opponent choice design can mitigate such behavior. Overall, the opponent choice design provides higher probabilities that the best player wins and also that the two best players meet, and reduces shirking, compared to the conventional bracket design.

This paper presents a landmark study of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the field of sports analytics. We developed a survey that examined personal and job-related demographics, as well as individual perceptions and experiences about EDI in the workplace. We sent the survey to individuals in the five major North American professional leagues, representatives from the Olympic and Paralympic Committees in Canada and the U.S., the NCAA Division I programs, companies in sports tech/analytics, and university research groups. Our findings indicate the presence of a clear dominant group in sports analytics identifying as: young (72.0 %), White (69.5 %), heterosexual (89.7 %) and male (82.0 %). Within professional sports, males in management positions earned roughly $30,000 (27 %) more on average compared to females. A smaller but equally alarming pay gap of $17,000 (14 %) was found between White and racialized management personnel. Of concern, females were nearly five times as likely to experience discrimination and twice as likely to have considered leaving their job due to isolation or feeling unwelcome. While they had similar levels of agreement regarding fair processes for rewards and compensation, females “strongly agreed” less often than males regarding equitable support, equitable workload, having a voice, and being taken seriously. Over one third (36.3 %) of females indicated that they “strongly agreed” that they must work harder than others to be valued equally, compared to 9.8 % of males. We conclude the paper with concrete recommendations that could be considered to create a more equitable, diverse and inclusive environment for individuals working within the sports analytics sector.

We first present a model for the outcome of snooker matches in which player strengths are allowed to vary deterministically with time. The results allow us to identify the greatest players of all time, and to examine the relationship between age and performance. Second, we present a random effects model which uses the estimated strengths from our first model, to forecast player performance, and to assess the extent to which early promise has been maintained. Ronnie O’Sullivan and Stephen Hendry are the two candidates for the title of the greatest of all time. We find that peak performance occurs between the ages of 25 and 30, younger than would be expected when compared to findings in other sports. Outside sport, these findings contribute to the general literature on variation of performance with age.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of these formalities is to ensure that players are paired fairly during the tournament and that the final ranking corresponds to the players’ true strength order. We contest the official FIDE player pairing routine by presenting alternative pairing rules. These can be enforced by computing maximum weight matchings in a carefully designed graph. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that a tournament format using our mechanism (1) yields fairer pairings in the rounds of the tournament and (2) produces a final ranking that reflects the players’ true strengths better than the state-of-the-art FIDE pairing system.

A fair and inclusive competition depends on a scoring system that takes all relevant factors into account. We analysed the current World Para Point System for swimming and identified several theoretical and practical disadvantages. We propose and test a Fair World Para Point System that not only improves the algorithm, but also extends it to accommodate for the age of the athlete. It also provides a method to break point ties. This will enable para masters swimmers for the first time to compete fairly with each other. We also develop and publish tools that enable event organisers to directly use the Fair World Para Point System.

The decathlon consists of ten events with scores which are then aggregated to determine the final ranking. We develop a decathlon scoring method which is far simpler than the existing standard (IAAF1984) tables, as there are only 9 parameters instead of 30 which have an impact on the overall rank. We first identify athletes who are on the Pareto-efficient frontier i.e. those who are not dominated by anyone else. We then remove these frontier athletes and again pick all non-dominated athletes to obtain a second dominating group/Pareto frontier and iterate this procedure for the decathlon data from 1986 to 2020. Each of these groups are then characterized by their set of ten median performances. Improving from the last to the top group can then be seen as a path of progress, leading from the lowest to the highest set of median performances. Every event should have the same importance, so we normalize the data such that the path of progress follows as much as possible a space diagonal of a ten dimensional hypercube. Furthermore, any adjustment of a benchmark does not change any actual decathlon performance, hence there cannot be any unwanted rank reversals. This allows a smooth adjustment of these tables in the future, if for instance a new type of javelin needs to be introduced to reduce the range. We normalize such that current performances between 7000 and 9000 points still fall into the same range with our point tables.