The top professional football league of Japan, the J. League Division 1 (J1) currently consists of 18 clubs. Each club is scheduled to play matches with the other 17 clubs at home and away stadiums, with a total of 34 games per year.
Compared to the multiple clubs based in the Kanto district, the Chugoku and Kyushu districts only have a single club each. This condition increases the sparsely organized clubs′ total burden of annual traveling for away games. This is due to the condition that the clubs return to their home town after each game and then travel again to the next away game even if they are scheduled for continuous away games.
With the kick off time set at 6 p.m. for the games played during the Golden Week holidays and summer season, the clubs are required to secure after-game accommodation at the site when playing at away games located at a distance from their home town.
In this research, information about the constraints currently applied for scheduling the games was obtained with cooperation from the J. League Association. We then interviewed the players, staffs and supporters of various teams and acquired the requests for scheduling the games.
Based on our survey, we propose a scheduling procedure for the J1 League game that satisfies the fundamental and additional constraints considered by the J. League Association and the requests from the players, staffs and supporters. Finally, the schedule generated from the proposed study is compared with the actual 2007 J1 schedule, for discussion.
