Moving from Round Robin to KO stages

[mikey]

Hi all,

Hopefully someone can guide or point me in the right direction to help!

Have ended up with the slightly uneven number of 14 teams for an upcoming 5-a-side football tournament I am helping to run and we are little unsure about ranking of teams after the round robin.

To guarantee a minimum number of games the split is three groups, two of five and one of four.  Through the groups it will be 3pts for the win, 1pt for the draw, 0pts for the loss.  Where teams are tied the places in the group will be decided by goal difference, then goals scored, then result between the tied teams, with a penalty shoot-out if sides still can't be seperated.

Taking either the top one or top two from each group (dependent on going to quarter- or semi-final stage) is obviously an easy task but is there a formula that can be used to work out which is the best placed team to join them?

Many thanks for any guidanace that can be offered!!

[Ian Wakeling]

In situations like this there will always be some unfairness in the scheduling and so finding a solution can be a problem.

Following your line of thought you could take the three group winners, and then to make up the 4 teams for the KO, you could either add the highest scoring team from the remainder or the team that was runner up to the best performing team among the 3 group winners.  I think I favour the latter as then two teams are taken from the toughest group.

Other suggestions might be to take the top 3 teams from the two groups of 5, and the top 2 teams from the group of 4 beforing moving to a quarter final stage.

Or how about 2 groups of 7 which would make moving to the KO stage much easier?

[mikey]

Thanks for the reply.

Two groups of seven was my original thinking as a way of sorting this out but that involves either 16 additional games or not having every team play each other in the group stages - invariably leading to moans if a team qualifies having avoided playing the hardest two teams in their group!

I think for minimum of confusion the best option appears to be to run quarter finals and opt to just drop the bottom two from each group.  Slightly bias against the teams in the smaller group but then that just depends on the luck of the draw on the morning of the tournament.

Cheers for your help, great idea for a resource forum is this!
Mikey

[wbport]

One possible option is the swiss guided round robin.  If the teams have rankings, seedings, or ratings you could have, for example with eight teams, 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, & 4-8.  Assign pairing numbers so these pairings will happen in the first round.  Don't follow the table from round to round but pick a round in which your leaders will be paired against each other.  If you have groups of 6 and 8 you won't have to have a bye in each round and perhaps you will have the time for an ordinary round robin for the group of 6.

You might want to consider a swiss system or SGRR for all 14 teams, but that may have to wait until next season.