ABSTRACT
Sports tournaments can be organized as round-robin leagues, knockout competitions or a combination of both. Tournament structures have changed to improve participation, revenues, entertainment value and safety. This chapter focuses on the problem of modelling and simulating sports tournaments to provide decision support information to tournament designers. It describes the use of regression analysis to produce the underlying models used in tournament simulators. The chapter then discusses the use of simulation packages for tournaments and the main algorithms and data structures that are used to produce the output information required by decision makers. Tournaments can be studied by simulating performances within the same structures of matches used in the actual tournaments. These structures may be round-robin tournaments, knockout tournaments or a combination of both. The chapter proposes an approach to performance modelling that provides the necessary parameters for a simulation system. It also describes the resulting model of European international soccer matches.
