http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulfletcher/2009/06/secrets_of_the_fixture_compute.html
Good read.
tl;dr
"Ever wondered why you have had to travel the length of the country on a wet Tuesday night to watch your team in action?
Or you haven't played at home on Boxing Day for the last three years?
Putting the fixture list together is incredibly complex - with a whole series of factors ensuring it is an increasingly difficult task.
Just to give you one example; every club is paired with another in regard to when they play their home and away fixtures. This is done for a number of reasons, one being so that clubs like Everton and Liverpool do not play at home on the same weekend.
West Ham, it turns out, are paired with Dagenham and Redbridge. But for reasons of revenue Southend request they do not play at home on the same day as the Hammers as they believe it impacts upon their attendance.
For most of the year Glenn works as an IT professional in Scotland but he has been compiling the fixtures since the 1993-94 season and describes the task both as an enormous puzzle and his summer job. He is
the man who owns the laptop that is the fixture computer.But slotting all the fixtures into the calendar is becoming more and more difficult.
He also manually creates the fixtures for Boxing Day and 28 December to try to minimise the travelling distance for fans. As Thompson readily admits, the computer has no concept of the distance between grounds.
The story doesn't end there.
Over the following week Snellgrove will deal with requests by clubs to switch days. Clubs cannot move a game away from an allocated weekend but they can switch the day of the match.
Cheltenham, for example, often play a home game on a Friday when there is a clash with the horse racing
festival."
Good read.
tl;dr
"Ever wondered why you have had to travel the length of the country on a wet Tuesday night to watch your team in action?
Or you haven't played at home on Boxing Day for the last three years?
Putting the fixture list together is incredibly complex - with a whole series of factors ensuring it is an increasingly difficult task.
Just to give you one example; every club is paired with another in regard to when they play their home and away fixtures. This is done for a number of reasons, one being so that clubs like Everton and Liverpool do not play at home on the same weekend.
West Ham, it turns out, are paired with Dagenham and Redbridge. But for reasons of revenue Southend request they do not play at home on the same day as the Hammers as they believe it impacts upon their attendance.
For most of the year Glenn works as an IT professional in Scotland but he has been compiling the fixtures since the 1993-94 season and describes the task both as an enormous puzzle and his summer job. He is
the man who owns the laptop that is the fixture computer.But slotting all the fixtures into the calendar is becoming more and more difficult.
He also manually creates the fixtures for Boxing Day and 28 December to try to minimise the travelling distance for fans. As Thompson readily admits, the computer has no concept of the distance between grounds.
The story doesn't end there.
Over the following week Snellgrove will deal with requests by clubs to switch days. Clubs cannot move a game away from an allocated weekend but they can switch the day of the match.
Cheltenham, for example, often play a home game on a Friday when there is a clash with the horse racing
festival."
Last edited by crump on Sat Jun 04, 2011 6:29 am; edited 4 times in total
