An Integer Programming Approach for Scheduling a Professional Sports League

Abstract

This paper gives integer linear programming (ILP) models for scheduling the League Phase of one of the most popular professional club competitions in the world, UEFA Champion’s League. There are 36 teams in the competition, but each team plays only 8 other teams in the League Phase. Thus, the difficulty or ease of a team’s opponents, known as strength of schedule (SOS), compared to other teams will be different. Our main ILP model aims to minimize the maximum difference between SOS of any two teams, thus making the schedule as fair as possible. We also give a model for creating a timetable of all the matchups obtained by the first model. The models were implemented and tested using optimization software AMPL. Our main model obtained a schedule with a difference 0.4 between the highest and the lowest SOS, while that difference is 19 for the actual 2024-2025 competition. Thus, our model returns a schedule that is significantly fairer compared to the actual competition.