2

I help to run a five-a-side tournament with my scout group; we tend to have around 40 teams which split across 4 age groups. We can't run full round-robins at the group stage, so instead we run 4 games for each team, award points and put the best teams through to a knockout round.

The fixtures are all pre-arranged the day before, so if a team doesn't show up on the day it's sometimes not possible to avoid the situation where a bye has to be awarded to some of the teams.

In this situation, what's the correct score to award? We award 3 points for a win, 2 for a score draw and 1 for nil-nil. In practice goal difference often decides who goes through to the knockouts.

FWIW my own answer would probably be to award a score draw, which might avoid introducing an unfair advantage without penalising the team for missing a game?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

There is no simple answer to this - you can probably make a reasonable case for any result apart from a loss. If this is causing a big problem for your tournaments, you probably need to rethink the tournament structure - have you considered e.g. running pools for the first but of the tournament, so the effect is limited to just that pool, rather than affecting the whole age bracket?

Improve this answer
3
  • Thanks Philip, after running this thing for 4 years I'm still feeling like a novice! We do do this when possible, so we'll usually have (depending on the number of entries) one or two groups of between 4 and 7 teams each. We then draw them against each other randomly in 4 games. We run the whole tournament in one day on 6 pitches so we could never run a full round robin!
    – Angry Dan
    Jun 8, 2015 at 8:09
  • If you can mange two pools of 7 = 14 teams, you're playing (14 * 4) / 2 = 28 games. With that, you can do a full round robin for up to 8 teams - after that split into two pools. At 12 teams, split into three pools of 4. The numbers will vary a bit according to how many gangs you can actually manage, but things always get much easier if you can actually do round-robin.
    – Philip Kendall ♦
    Jun 8, 2015 at 8:40
  • Philip is right, in this case you could just allow a 3-0 win for each team for the game against the not showing up team :) And it depends on the game length too
    – LeReferee
    Jun 10, 2015 at 8:54

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.