Junior Football Tournament

[Iffy49]

I am looking for the best schedule for our annual football tournament.  We have 4 age groups on any one day, with 16 teams in each age group, divided into two leagues of 8 teams each.  

Each league of 8 has two pitches it can play on throughout the day.  Each match is 10 minutes long, with 5 minutes turnaround between matches.  I want a schedule that will:

a. Keep the time between matches to a minimum (i.e. one match rest between played matches, but not more than 2, if possible)

b. Try to prevent any team from playing two matches in a row.   If this is not possible, then try and make every team play one game straight after another.

If it is a better fit, we would consider cutting the entries to 12 teams per age group, and 6 teams per league.

Is this possible?

Many thanks

Ian

[Iffy49]

I assume that as no-one has managed to come up with an answer for my problem, that there is not a simple (or indeed complicated) one that fits it, so I should stop looking for the holy grail and make do with a normal schedule, and put up with the complaints.

Thanks anyway.

Ian

[Ian Wakeling]

Ian,

Are you wanting the 8 teams in a league to play each other once?  I have a program that will try to minimise the back-to-back play and it produces solutions like the one below.

(E G) (B F) 
(A C) (D H) 
(B E) (F G) 
(A H) (C D) 
(D F) (A E) 
(C H) (B G) 
(D E) (A F) 
(C G) (B H) 
(E F) (A D) 
(G H) (B C) 
(B D) (A G) 
(F H) (C E) 
(A B) (D G) 
(C F) (E H) 

This is almost what you want, as it has taken the number of back-to-back matches down to 4.  Specifically teams A,B,D & G have back to back macthes, while teams B,E,F & G have two bye rounds in a row.

Is that any help,

Ian.

[Iffy49]

Ian,
Thanks for the reply.  Things have changed slightly from last year now.

The 8 teams will only have one pitch to play on, not two.  All teams are expected to play each other once.  

The wait between games is more important than playing back-to-back games.  

Would it help, if the two eight team leagues played across the two pitches, or is it exactly the same?  Alternatively, what improvement could be made, if we had two leagues of 6 teams, rather than 8?

Thanks for your help

Ian