Round-Robin Fixture List

Round-Robin Fixture List Thursday night five-a-side — autumn Everybody plays everybody. Print it, pin it up, and fill in the boxes as you go. WHAT THIS IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT - This sheet is a schedule and a blank table, and nothing else. It states no points rule, no tie-break rule and no league rule of any kind, because those differ by sport, by country and by league, and they change. The points column is yours to fill in. - No sport's authority, no named competition and no book of rules is quoted anywhere here. If your group answers to one, its own paperwork is the source and this page is not. - Nothing here says how long a match takes or how many fit into a session. This tool has no way of knowing that, and it is not going to guess. Put your own timings against the round numbers by hand. - Rounds are numbered, never dated. This tool has no clock, so it cannot say which round falls on which day and will not invent one to look helpful. - The pairings themselves are proved rather than asserted: the tests build the complete set of pairs for every entrant count and check that each one appears exactly the right number of times. THE ARITHMETIC Entrants ............. 7 Pairs ................ 7 × 6 ÷ 2 = 21 Fixtures ............. 21 (everyone meets once) Rounds ............... 7 Round count: an odd count plays 7 rounds, because the empty place in the circle takes one seat. Fixtures each ........ 6 per entrant One entrant stands still and the rest walk around them one place per round. Draw the entrants in two rows facing each other, hold the top-left one in place, and rotate everybody else one seat each round: every pair ends up facing each other exactly once, and no entrant is ever in two places at the same time. That is the whole method, and it is why the fixture count and the round count come out at exactly the arithmetic printed above. FIXTURES P = pitch, table or board. P2·3 means the third turn on P2. ROUND 1 P1 Bramble Rovers v Gorse Park [ ] - [ ] P2 Cedar Town v Foxhill Athletic [ ] - [ ] P3 Dunmoor United v Elmfield Wanderers [ ] - [ ] Bye: Aster FC — sits this round out ROUND 2 P1 Gorse Park v Aster FC [ ] - [ ] P2 Bramble Rovers v Elmfield Wanderers [ ] - [ ] P3 Cedar Town v Dunmoor United [ ] - [ ] Bye: Foxhill Athletic — sits this round out ROUND 3 P1 Aster FC v Foxhill Athletic [ ] - [ ] P2 Gorse Park v Elmfield Wanderers [ ] - [ ] P3 Bramble Rovers v Cedar Town [ ] - [ ] Bye: Dunmoor United — sits this round out ROUND 4 P1 Elmfield Wanderers v Aster FC [ ] - [ ] P2 Foxhill Athletic v Dunmoor United [ ] - [ ] P3 Gorse Park v Cedar Town [ ] - [ ] Bye: Bramble Rovers — sits this round out ROUND 5 P1 Aster FC v Dunmoor United [ ] - [ ] P2 Elmfield Wanderers v Cedar Town [ ] - [ ] P3 Foxhill Athletic v Bramble Rovers [ ] - [ ] Bye: Gorse Park — sits this round out ROUND 6 P1 Cedar Town v Aster FC [ ] - [ ] P2 Dunmoor United v Bramble Rovers [ ] - [ ] P3 Foxhill Athletic v Gorse Park [ ] - [ ] Bye: Elmfield Wanderers — sits this round out ROUND 7 P1 Aster FC v Bramble Rovers [ ] - [ ] P2 Dunmoor United v Gorse Park [ ] - [ ] P3 Elmfield Wanderers v Foxhill Athletic [ ] - [ ] Bye: Cedar Town — sits this round out PITCHES, TABLES OR BOARDS Fixtures in the busiest round ... 3 You said you have ............... 3 That covers the busiest round with 0 to spare, so a whole round can go on at the same time. THE BYE An odd number of entrants cannot all be paired up, so one extra place is added to the circle and whoever faces that empty place sits the round out. Because the empty place meets every entrant exactly once over the rotation, everybody gets exactly one bye and nobody gets two. The bye is printed by name in every round it happens, because the commonest way a fixture list goes wrong is somebody quietly disappearing from a round and standing about all evening wondering when their turn is. HOME AND AWAY, COUNTED The entrant who stands still would otherwise be at home in every round, so that one pairing is flipped on alternate rounds. The rest fall where the rotation puts them. The real counts are printed below rather than a claim of balance, because a claim is easy to make and a count can be checked. Entrant home away total byes Aster FC 3 3 6 1 Bramble Rovers 3 3 6 1 Cedar Town 3 3 6 1 Dunmoor United 3 3 6 1 Elmfield Wanderers 3 3 6 1 Foxhill Athletic 3 3 6 1 Gorse Park 3 3 6 1 Every entrant has exactly 3 at home and 3 away. BLANK STANDINGS GRID — fill this in yourself Entrant P W D L F A Pts ------------------ --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Aster FC ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Bramble Rovers ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Cedar Town ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Dunmoor United ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Elmfield Wanderers ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Foxhill Athletic ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Gorse Park ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ P played · W won · D drawn · L lost · F for · A against · Pts points The points column is deliberately blank and this tool says nothing about how it is filled in. What a win, a draw or a defeat is worth where you play, and what happens when two entrants finish level, are yours to set or to look up in your own group's own paperwork. Write the rule you are using at the top of the sheet before the first round, in front of everybody, and there is nothing left to argue about afterwards. The columns are padded by character count, not by how wide a character looks. Names in scripts whose characters are drawn wide, and names with emoji in them, will sit slightly out of line on screen even though every row has the same number of characters in it. Print it, pin it up where everyone can see it, and fill the boxes in as the results come. A fixture list on a wall settles more arguments than a fixture list on a phone, and everybody can see at a glance whose turn it is and who is sitting out.