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Fixtures Program Ver 1.1

Do you have problems creating league fixtures which produce a 'fair' schedule for all teams ?
Do you have problems running such leagues on a set of fields and need to allocate matches in some 'sensible' way ?
Read on !

The 'Fixtures' program produces a season's schedule list for a league. The production of a good fixture list is a difficult problem as is even the definition of what is a good fixture list. At this stage a good fixture list is defined as one that is fair to all teams.

The 'Fixtures' program introduces statistics that measure fairness. As an example the program tries to produce a home,away,home,...alternating schedule. Statistics are produced to show the success or failure of this attempt.
The algorithm runs under the control of numerous parameters that you can vary. Continuing the example above it is possible to increase the number of consecutive home or away games from 1 to 2 to allow the algorithm to finish. Now in more detail.

A good fixture list should have the following properties.

Each team must play each other team. Also the norm is that each team plays each other team twice, once at home and once away.

The season is split into 2 halves, the second is the mirror image of the first half.

The number of consecutive home or away games should be minimised. For small leagues 24 or less the maximum should be 2 while for larger leagues this is also the aim but tends to increase to 3.

For the first 2 games and the last 2 games in the first half of the season each team should play one home game and one away game. This is required for the operation of forming the mirror image of the first half and then appending it to the first half. This condition ensures that at the join no team will have more than 2 consecutive home or away games. To be precise this is sufficient but not necessary condition.

It is expected that there will be teams, which come from the same city, who will require to play all there games out of phase of each other. That is when Manchester United play at home Manchester City will play away.