How do league fixtures get decided?
Discussion
If you look at most sports with national leagues, they all pretty much share the same format. Each team plays every other team twice, once home and once away, and most will alternate home and away games.
Simple on the face of it, but how much more complicated is the reality?
The next most obvious source of complication is that you never seem to see teams playing a home fixture one week, and then the away fixture against the same team the following week. I assume this is deliberate, rather than coincidental?
Next up, I assume once you get into the likes of the football and rugby premierships which can have crowd numbers of 10,000 or more, there is action taken to make sure that sides with grounds close together don't have simultaneous home fixtures? Chelsea vs Arsenal and Fulham vs Spurs on the same day would make for a rather interesting District Line, for example.
Moving on from that, league planning obviously has to be extended even further when there is ground sharing between two clubs - London Irish and Reading FC sharing the Madejski stadium for example.
Now, all of the above is doubtless a real headache, but one which can presumably be resolved pretty straightforwardly with a bit of computer power, but I assume there also has to be an element of subjectivity applied to fixtures as well? Using the football premiership to illustrate the point, whilst there may be no logistical reason to prevent Chelsea's last 5 games of the season being against Portsmouth, Wolves, West Ham, Bolton & Birmingham and Arsenal's being against Man U, Man City, Spurs, Villa and Liverpool, I don't imagine this is ever likely to happen? There always seems to be a degree of spreading the harder and easier games through the season.
Does anyone know how this is actually all done in reality, what takes priority over what and the like?
Simple on the face of it, but how much more complicated is the reality?
The next most obvious source of complication is that you never seem to see teams playing a home fixture one week, and then the away fixture against the same team the following week. I assume this is deliberate, rather than coincidental?
Next up, I assume once you get into the likes of the football and rugby premierships which can have crowd numbers of 10,000 or more, there is action taken to make sure that sides with grounds close together don't have simultaneous home fixtures? Chelsea vs Arsenal and Fulham vs Spurs on the same day would make for a rather interesting District Line, for example.
Moving on from that, league planning obviously has to be extended even further when there is ground sharing between two clubs - London Irish and Reading FC sharing the Madejski stadium for example.
Now, all of the above is doubtless a real headache, but one which can presumably be resolved pretty straightforwardly with a bit of computer power, but I assume there also has to be an element of subjectivity applied to fixtures as well? Using the football premiership to illustrate the point, whilst there may be no logistical reason to prevent Chelsea's last 5 games of the season being against Portsmouth, Wolves, West Ham, Bolton & Birmingham and Arsenal's being against Man U, Man City, Spurs, Villa and Liverpool, I don't imagine this is ever likely to happen? There always seems to be a degree of spreading the harder and easier games through the season.
Does anyone know how this is actually all done in reality, what takes priority over what and the like?
KP - read this article a couple of months back, I somewhat naively thought it was more random than this...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulfletcher/2009/06/se...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulfletcher/2009/06/se...
See comments on Chelsea and Fulham 
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