New decision models for team formation problem of sports clubs before the match stage: A volleyball club application

Team formation problem for sports clubs before the match stage is a player assignment problem that coach assigns the players among the squat to the identified in-field positions to win the match. In recent years, in the rapidly growing sports industry, team building problems have gained great importance for economic and sporting success. Because of the increase in the number of players and the increased availability of data and data provided by technological developments, coaches are forced to evaluate huge amount of quantitative and qualitative information. For these reasons, the number of scientific studies on team forming problems has increased in recent years. In this thesis, firstly, the studies related with team formation problem for sports clubs are analyzed in detail and the need for new points of view and approaches are addressed. Then, regarding the systems approach 4 different decision models are developed to give aid to the coach on the team forming decision and how to use these models are pointed out. The first model is the one that maximizes the weighted total performance and the second model is the goal programming models that take the performance expectancies of the coach as target values. The third model maximizes the team and player harmony and the last model is a multi-objective model of performance and harmony. Proposed decision models' parameters must be found, forecasted or obtained for the usability of the models in real life problems. With the stated purposes, the available techniques are presented for the model users in general sense. Then a guideway for which technique must be used under which circumstances is outlined. In order to illustrate how the proposed models can be used in real life problems, the proposed approach is applied to a volleyball club in Ankara which is competing in the men's league. To do this, we first predicted and determined relevant parameters of the models and then the models are solved by using CPLEX 12.6.0.0 version. It has been observed that the models give meaningful and applicable results in relation to the solutions and the decision maker's priorities and expectations. The implications of model results, post-optimality analysis and how the coach can use them are also included in the application.