Dynamic Staging

What is Dynamic ⚡ Staging?

Dynamic staging is an, admittedly, made up term that we came up with. To be transparent, we haven't been able to create simpler terminology, but it is straightforward.

Dynamic= teams schedules, placement depend on varying criteria determined dynamically throughout the season.
Staging = multiple stages to season. Group stage, Divisional stage, sometimes playoff stage as well.

Simplest explanation possible - this is very flexible way of scheduling matches to reach optimal parity and fairness within a division that has a large amount of teams.

Why did Gotham make the switch to this type of formatting?

We made this switch for several reasons:

• Some teams do not know their appropriate skill level, often signing up for the wrong one. This happens for many reasons, but "skill level" is incredibly ambiguous. Everyone's perception of this varies drastically based off their previous experience within the sport.
• Teams abuse traditional formatting. Some teams prefer to play inferior teams so they can easily rack up the goals. Seems far fetched, but we've seen it plenty of times.
• Teams prefer location and night of the week over skill level. Nothing wrong with this at all. Sometimes you can only play at certain time and a certain location and the "skill level" may not match. Dynamic staging is a solution for this.
• Divisions with 10 or more teams do not work for traditional rec. league formatting. At Gotham our priority is fairness first and foremost. You will never play in our leagues and play a "random" schedule like many of the leagues in the area. You will either play every team once, or twice, or however many times it takes to ensure each team has played the same teams an equal amount.
• Worst format you can have is where teams are scheduled at random because there are too many teams, and a certain team wins because they played only the bottom table teams, and never the top table teams.
• Dynamic staging creates parity, which is great for everyone. At the end of the day we are here to play soccer and enjoy challenging teams of similar level. No one likes a blowout, except for the few abusers outlined above.
• This format also gives teams struggling through the group stage a renewed hope of winning some silverware. Increased engagement. Less forfeits.