Tournament organizers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be better off by exerting a lower effort. It is shown that the European qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup are not strategy-proof in this sense: a team might be eliminated if it wins in the last matchday of group stage,...

UEFA Euro 1996 qualifying is known to violate strategy-proofness. It is proved that a team could be better off by exerting a lower effort: it might be optimal to concede some goals in order to achieve a better position among runners-up, and hence avoid a hazardous play-off. We show that it is...

UEFA Euro 1996 qualifying is known to violate strategy-proofness. It is proved that a team could be better off by exerting a lower effort: it might be optimal to concede some goals in order to achieve a better position among runners-up, and hence avoid a hazardous play-off. We show that it is...

We discuss the strategy-proofness of multistage tournaments. In a tournament with subsequent group stages, players are divided into groups in the preliminary and main rounds, where they play pairwise matches against each other. The higher ranked players qualify to the next stage such that...

Tournament organizers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be better off by exerting a lower effort. It is shown that the European qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup are not strategy-proof in this sense: a team might be eliminated if it wins its last match in the group stage, while...

The 2018-19 UEFA Nations League is the inaugural season of this competition, which provides the basis of the seeding for the 55 men's national football teams participating in the qualification process of the UEFA European Championship 2020. In addition, unlike previous editions, the teams for...

Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be fairer than the simpler deterministic Alternating (ABBA)...

Fairness has several interpretations in sports, one of them being that the rules should guarantee incentive compatibility, namely, a team cannot beworse off due to better results in any feasible scenario. The current seeding regime of the most prestigious annual European club football...

Egyéni preferencialisták aggregálásának elterjedt eszköze a pontozási rendszerek használata, amikor az egyes rangsorok minden pozíciója adott számú pontot ér, az aggregált sorrend pedig az alternatívák így összegyűjtött pontjai alapján alakul ki. Általában ezt az...

This article investigates the qualification for the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League (CL), the most prestigious club competition in European football, with respect to the theoretical property of strategyproofness. We find that in three seasons (2015-2016, 2016-2017,...