Senior League Compacting and Rebalancing

30-03-2017 15:00
This season, we have decided to compact and rebalance/redistribute all senior leagues as part of the promotion/relegation process.

League Compacting


The goal of this step is to ensure that all active teams are promoted as high as possible, as well as create space for new teams to join the game a bit higher up in the league system by dropping teams that have been inactive for more than a year and bankrupt teams to the bottom.

Teams will be prioritized in the following order:

1. Teams that were considered active when the final league positions were set this past Monday (not grayed out in the league table)
2. Teams that were considered inactive when the final league positions were set but have since become active, i.e. reactivated and newly assigned teams
3. Inactive teams that have been inactive for less than a year
4. Free teams (available to new managers)
5. Inactive teams that have been inactive for more than a year
6. Bankrupt teams

We will not take existing parent-child relationships of the leagues into account when doing this, which basically means that teams that are promoted/relegated this season will join a random league in the division they end up in.


League Rebalancing/Redistribution


The goal of this step is to shuffle things around a bit to keep things fresh and ensure that all leagues within a division are as balanced as possible, removing imbalances that have built up in certain leagues over the years.

Without going into too much detail, we will rank all teams in each division based on their league results and then try to create as balanced leagues as possible based on that. In Div2 for example, there are 9 leagues and 108 teams in total. What we will do here is take the 9 "best" teams and place each in a different random Div2 league. Then we will do the same with the next 9 teams (10th-18th "best"), and so on, until all leagues have been filled.

This is basically how we handle the World League and Youth League promotions, and we think it is the best way to ensure that the different leagues in a division are as balanced as possible.


New Teams


As we want new teams competing against other new teams during their first season, we will segment the divisions that contain both free teams and non-free teams so that the free teams get their own leagues, and then fill those up one league at a time. We will make sure to come up with a good way to keep things balanced over time despite this segmentation.


League Promotions Going Forward


We have not decided exactly how to handle promotions going forward (after this season), but it is something we are currently discussing, and we will make sure to let everyone have their say before we make a final decision.

We will probably not go back to the old system, but rather try to come up with something better where the goals are:

* To make sure that active teams are always promoted as high as possible in the league system, ignoring the parent-child relationships of the leagues if necessary
* To make sure that new teams can join the game as high up as possible in the league system
* To make sure that leagues within a division stay as balanced as possible over time

With that said, we know a lot of people enjoy the rivalries that form as a result of the current system, and it is something we will keep in mind when thinking about this.

/Crew