Csató, László (SZTAKI, Corvinus)
Fair
tournament design: a flaw of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualification
The integrity of a sport can be seriously undermined if its rules punish winning, which creates incentives for strategic manipulation. Hence a tournament design is called unfair if the overall win probabilities are not ordered according to the teams' ranking based on their past performances. Our computer simulations reveal that the qualification for the UEFA European Championship 2020 suffers from this problem: being a top team in the lowest-ranked League D of the 2018-19 UEFA Nations League substantially increases the probability of qualifying compared to being a bottom team in the higher-ranked League C. The unfairness can be remarkably reduced or even eliminated with slightly changing the path formation policy of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying play-offs. We present how the misaligned rules have severely punished a team for winning a match years before. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) should reconsider the format of future qualifications to eliminate the unfair advantage enjoyed by certain teams.
Reference:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03325
The talk is
held in Hungarian!
Az előadás
nyelve magyar!
Date: Sep 15, Tuesday 4:15pm
Place: BME, Building „Q”, Room
QBF13