A new hybrid method for seed determination in sport competitions: the case of European Football Championship 2012. (1st January 2014) - Arabzad, S. Mohammad
One of the most important issues in sports tournaments is team seeding. Determining how the teams face one another and direct impact on the championship clarifies the importance of this issue. Various worldwide statistics and surveys identify football as the most popular and interesting sport. In most football tournaments, achieved scores in such related tournaments are considered as a criterion for seeding process, whereas special attention to the outcomes does not seem to be a logical formalism. For instance, there are various explicit and implicit criteria that reflect the quality of playing such as possession of the ball, the average goals and attempts on goal. Compared with the result-oriented viewpoint, taking into account the above mentioned criteria directly affects the attractiveness of the tournament through proper seeding. In this paper, using DEA and TOPSIS techniques, two novel approaches are proposed as team seeding in sports tournaments. The DEA is used when the weights of criteria is unknown whereas TOPSIS is employed when the weights of the criteria is determined. In order to show the efficiency of the proposed approaches, seeding pots of Euro 2012 football tournament are analysed as a case study.