A numerical study of tournament structure and seeding policy for the soccer World Cup Finals

Tournament outcome uncertainty depends on: the design of the tournament;and the relative strengths of the competitors – the competitivebalance. A tournament design comprises the arrangement of the individualmatches, which we call the tournament structure, the seedingpolicy and the progression rules. In this paper, we investigate the effectof seeding policy for various tournament structures, while takingaccount of competitive balance. Our methodology uses tournamentoutcome uncertainty to consider the effect of seeding policy and otherdesign changes. The tournament outcome uncertainty is measuredusing the tournament outcome characteristic which is the probabilityPq,R that a team in the top 100q pre-tournament rank percentileprogresses forward from round R, for all q and R.We use Monte Carlosimulation to calculate the values of this metric. We find that, ingeneral, seeding favours stronger competitors, but that the degreeof favouritism varies with the type of seeding. Reseeding after eachround favours the strong to the greatest extent.The ideas in the paperare illustrated using the soccer World Cup Finals tournament