Generating Fixtures from a list of n

Question

Suppose I have N teams and what to generate a fixture list, where every team plays every other team, what is the best practice for this. Is there a known algorithm that does this nicely? Efficiency isn't really a necessity as this only needs to be generated once a season.

To be more specific, I'll start with some definitions: I have N teams... T_1, T_2, ... , T_n. If N is odd, include a 'ghost' team to make the amount of teams even. A set of fixtures for a week is a set of N/2 pairs, with no team in more than one pair. A 'fixture list' is set of sets of fixtures such that every team is paired with every other team.

What I am trying to do is create a 'fixture list' with some kind of random element to it. Thanks

Answer 1

Here is the usual way. If you need some random element, you can shuffle the list of teams first. It doesn't matter much, since every team plays every other anyway.