Round-robin schedule generator

How to use it

Type or paste the teams, one per line. Choose Play once for a single round robin or Home and away for a double round robin, where the second half of the season repeats the first with the venues reversed. The schedule updates as you type. The team on the left of each fixture is the home team; if venues do not matter in your league, read it simply as a pairing.

To keep the season going after the schedule, the league manager uses exactly this fixture list and adds score entry, a live table with your sport's tiebreakers and a link you can share with the players.

"Round" means one set of games in which each team plays at most once. It might be a week in an evening league, a matchday in a season, or a time slot on a single tournament day. If you have more courts or pitches than games per round, you can play two rounds at once; if you have fewer, a round spills over several slots.

The method: the circle method

The schedule is built with the circle method, the standard construction for round robins. Put the teams in two facing rows. Team 1 stays fixed; every other team moves one place clockwise after each round. Each team faces the one opposite it. After n − 1 rotations every pair has met exactly once, and no pair has met twice. The mathematical reason is that each rotation shifts every non-fixed team's opponent by a fixed step, and with n − 1 positions in the circle that step visits every other position once.

For an odd number of teams, a placeholder is added to make the count even. Whoever is drawn against the placeholder in a round has the bye, so every team rests exactly once. The fixed team alternates home and away each round. For every other pairing, the team in the upper row is at home, which leaves each team's home and away totals within one game of each other.

Worked example: seven teams

Seven teams become eight positions with the placeholder, so there are 8 − 1 = 7 rounds of three real games, 21 games in all, which matches 7 × 6 ÷ 2 = 21. In round 1 above, Aces meet the placeholder and so rest, while Bears play Giants, Comets play Falcons and Dragons play Eagles. For round 2, everyone except Aces moves one seat along the circle, so the placeholder now faces Falcons, who rest, and Aces play Giants. Over the seven rounds each team rests once and plays six games, three at home and three away.

Round-robin sizes at a glance

Limits worth knowing

The number of games grows with the square of the number of teams. Six teams play 15 games; twenty teams play 190, and a double round robin of twenty is the 380-game season of many national football leagues. For a one-day event with more than about eight teams, split into pools, run a round robin in each, then send the pool winners into a knockout bracket.

The generator balances home and away totals, not home and away runs. In a single round robin, a team can have three or four home games in a row followed by a run of away games. Most amateur leagues do not mind; professional fixture lists are produced by solvers that also handle stadium availability, television slots and travel, which is a far harder problem than generating the pairings.

Nor does it know about your calendar. It will not skip holidays, avoid a venue clash or put derbies on a particular date. Generate the pairings here, then assign rounds to dates yourself. Once results come in, the standings calculator turns them into a table.