A Decision Support System for Simulating and Predicting the Impacts of Various Tournament Structures on Tournament Outcomes

Abstract Simulating and predicting tournament outcomes has become an increasingly popular research topic. The outcomes can be influenced by several factors, such as attack, defence and home advantage strength values, as well as tournament structures. However, the claim that different structures, such as knockout (KO), round-robin (RR) and hybrid structures, have their own time restraints and requirements has limited the evaluation of the best structure for a particular type of sports tournament using quantitative approaches. To address this issue, this study develops a decision support system (DSS) using Microsoft Visual Basic, based on the object-oriented programming approach, to simulate and forecast the impact of the various tournament structures on soccer tournament outcomes. The DSS utilized the attack, defence and home advantage values of the teams involved in the Malaysia Super League 2018 to make better prediction. The rankings produced by the DSS were then compared to the actual rankings using Spearman correlation to reveal the simulated accuracy level. The results indicate that a double RR produces a higher correlation value than a single RR, indicating that more matches played provide more data to create better predictions. Additionally, a random KO predicts better than a ranking KO, suggesting that pre-ranking teams before a tournament starts does not significantly impact the prediction. The findings of this study can help tournament organizers plan forthcoming games by simulating various tournament structures to determine the most suitable one for their needs.