In this thesis, we study tournament design from an operations research perspective. We first review the main tournament formats, their evaluation
criteria, and selected mathematical results, and use the introduced terminology to classify thirteen Slovenian sports competitions. In the second part, we
formalize a tournament in which teams rotate among capacity-constrained
sessions. We derive a lower bound on its duration, identify the conditions
under which an optimal schedule has a two-phase structure, establish a connection with Howell designs, and analyze the pairing system used in a double
session. We prove that a pairing without repeated matches always exists
whenever more than three teams participate and show that the score difference does not affect the choice of the next opponent. We also identify the
system’s limitations: the structural advantage enjoyed by a winner paired
with a loser, an additional match when the number of teams is odd, and low
ranking efficacy resulting from only two matches per team. We implement
a heuristic and an exact CP-SAT model in Python and use experiments to
verify and quantitatively evaluate our findings.
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