Splitting leagues mid season

[billys_boots]

I don't know if this is possible but can a league be split mid season. The scenario happens in a few European leagues, examples are Scottish Premiership where after 33 games (three rounds) the league is split into top6 and bottom 6 for one more round robin of fixtures and Andorra premier league is split after 2 round robins and a further 2 round robins are played one for the championship and the other for relegation. In both instances points are carried forward.

There are instances, Belgium comes to mind, where after the split points are halved and there might be instances where points are reset to zero, although I can't think of one at the moment.

I am looking to able to have a split with all points carried forward and want to know of this can be done.

I could create a prom-rel play off cup but I don't think points from the main league can be carried forward to the second phase (the play-off league).

[gunnar]

True, this is currently not possible. I will look into it.
We basically need 2 extra tags in the promotion or relegation
1. transfer points
2. points modifier

But we have to be dcarefull as with Belgian 1B league there is also the first half champion and second half champion thing which makes this even worse

[billys_boots]

Splitting leagues mid season is becoming more common in Europe especially with smaller leagues, those with 10 or 12 teams. I recall seeing one league, it could be Belgium, where after the split,points already gained are halved before being carried forward. This is probably unique and not worth bothering with.

[will_the_canuck]

True, this is currently not possible. I will look into it.
We basically need 2 extra tags in the promotion or relegation
1. transfer points
2. points modifier

But we have to be careful as with Belgian 1B league there is also the first half champion and second half champion thing which makes this even worse

This part above, with the first half and second half champions...welcome to the Mexican system, although they call it an Apertura and Clausura. There are also some countries in South America which follow this too, I believe. And the Canadian Premier League is following this format also. Basically when looking at what was implied to the Belgian 1B league, there is a mini tournament for the first half and a mini tournament for the second half, but the points aren't transferred between the mini tournaments. There could be a main table that is used to see who gets relegated, but beyond that, it does not appear to be of any other use. And I should add that the two winners of the two mini tournaments play each other and then THAT winner gets to advance to the Belgian 1A league, although if the same team wins both mini tournaments, do they still have to play the two-legged promotion final with the next best team or what? That will be interesting to see.

Splitting leagues mid season is becoming more common in Europe especially with smaller leagues, those with 10 or 12 teams. I recall seeing one league, it could be Belgium, where after the split,points already gained are halved before being carried forward. This is probably unique and not worth bothering with.

Although you'll likely hate me for saying this but it seems these leagues are trying to stir up some interest, maybe North American style, by having a greater amount of teams being able to progress or regress by splitting the leagues up in a certain way and thus have the obvious choices potentially have a chance not to relegate or a chance to win and/or get promoted, depending on what the goal is. As for splitting the leagues at a certain point and then putting them into cups to complete their season, although being able to transfer the points would be more fairer to some, starting from scratch might be more exciting as a relegated team just might not get relegated after all and a promoted team just might not get promoted after all. If you were that team that might have reached success, it would suck but if you were going down, you would be happy to stay up. As gyboth originally made this to be simple, would having these options make the game just as simple or harder, even though harder would be more realistic?

So although these points that gunnar is suggesting would be nice to have, are they truly necessary? I guess if you implement them, hopefully they can be documented for future definition developers.

Bye for now,

will_the_canuck

[will_the_canuck]

I don't know if this is possible but can a league be split mid season. The scenario happens in a few European leagues, examples are Scottish Premiership where after 33 games (three rounds) the league is split into top6 and bottom 6 for one more round robin of fixtures and Andorra premier league is split after 2 round robins and a further 2 round robins are played one for the championship and the other for relegation. In both instances points are carried forward.

I am looking to able to have a split with all points carried forward and want to know of this can be done.

I could create a prom-rel play off cup but I don't think points from the main league can be carried forward to the second phase (the play-off league).

Ok. I am going through some of the old posts because I can. When I think of this option/feature, it does offer promise but also will fail in some regards, as the current code won't allow it. And unless parts of it are redone, it still won't work the way you want it to, I think. I should also add that this feature request was mentioned here, on the bygfoot feature request page on sourceforge.net.

Case in point is the use of a cup file to determine a team to be relegated. In the posts found here and here, it is discussed what happens when you have a cup file try to determine a relegated team as the first instance of a relegation within the country definitions...it fails.

From the sounds of what you want to do, having a bottom 6 cup competition and have the loser then relegated, it will currently fail if it is the first instance of a relegation within your definitions. Also, as it would be a promotion/relegation cup, if it was just transferring the last placed team to a lower division, that would be simple enough. But if the second lowest team was perhaps going to play in a relegation cup to see if they would survive or be relegated, that might even pose more of an issue, if it was coded wrong. Using the code from league file league_sweden4a.xml as an example:

Code: Select all

		<prom_games>
			<prom_games_cup_sid>sweden_promo4a</prom_games_cup_sid>
			<prom_games_dest_sid>sweden4a</prom_games_dest_sid>
			<prom_games_loser_sid>sweden5a sweden5b</prom_games_loser_sid>
			<prom_games_number_of_advance>1</prom_games_number_of_advance>
		</prom_games>

We see with the above code that from the promotional cup file, 1 team goes to sweden4a and the rest are split between sweden5a and sweden5b. I am wondering if in this 6 team cup, could we do things a little differently. Assuming the 12 team league is tier 1 and the loser will be sent down to tier 2, could the <prom_games> area be written like the following:

Code: Select all

		<prom_games>
			<prom_games_cup_sid>tier1_promo</prom_games_cup_sid>
			<prom_games_loser_sid>tier2</prom_games_loser_sid>
			<prom_games_number_of_advance>5</prom_games_number_of_advance>
		</prom_games>

And the above code could be a part of the tier 2 league definition. Or would it have to be a part of the tier 1 league definition. I don't know. That's what testing is for. The reason I'm coding the above example like it is is so that only the loser of the cup will be moved, assuming the cup had 6 teams compete. By not mentioning them in the <prom_games_dest_sid> tag, it could potentially allow the 5th placed team in the cup to then be used in another promotional cup between tiers 1 and 2, if need be, without already accounting for the 5th placed team by having them moved back to tier 1. Otherwise, if we used the <prom_games_dest_sid> tag, might it create an error where the 5th placed team might be referenced twice after the season is over? As I have seen, when using the <prom_games> coding, the <prom_games_loser_sid> can be omitted and the <prom_games_dest_sid> can just be used. Well, thinking the other way around since we don't want to move the top 5 teams in this cup file, we just want to move the last placed team, would something like this work? This is a good question I think.

So beyond all of that, the idea of being able to transfer points to another component for the use of promotion/international cup rankings and also the use of relegation is a nice thought, but getting it to work might be a little more difficult than once thought as more areas would need to be worked on or looked at, to potentially get it to work. Now, whether or not the point of the first relegation instance in a country definition having to be a direct relegation based upon league standing is in the new version that tstellar is working on, I don't know but testing would definitely need to be done to see if that still exists the way it does in version 2.3.2. As it stands, if the points transfer was just used for promotion/international cup rankings and relegations that occurred in tiers 2 and below, then it wouldn't be an issue. But since the relegations would be involving the top tiers, that's the problem that needs to be resolved first before this feature has any chance of working. If not, you can see future definition makers use this points transfer feature and want to use it for relegations and if they don't test their code, it will fail as it will.

Anyways, maybe this is something that tstellar can look into as it could be fun to use. I'm just adding some points to bring posts together.

Bye for now,

Will aka will_the_canuck