Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the teams becomes non-trivial: it is necessary to account for schedule imbalances and possibly for the different number of matches played. First in the literature, we identify a set of desired axioms for ranking in these incomplete tournaments. It is verified that the generalized row sum, a parametric family of scoring rules, satisfies all of them. In particular, the well-established least-squares method maximizes the influence of the strength of opponents on the ranking. Our approach is applied for six major premier European soccer competitions, where the rankings are found to be robust concerning the weight of adjustment for the strength of the opponents. Some methodologically simpler alternative policies are also discussed.

中文翻译：

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冠状病毒和体育联赛：当赛季无法恢复时获得公平的排名

许多体育联赛都以严格安排的循环赛形式进行，留出有限的时间窗口来推迟比赛。如果由于 2020 年冠状病毒大流行等外部冲击而无法恢复赛季，那么球队的排名就变得非常重要：有必要考虑赛程不平衡以及可能的不同比赛数量。首先在文献中，我们确定了一组期望的公理，用于在这些不完整的锦标赛中进行排名。验证了广义行总和，一个参数化的评分规则族，满足所有这些。尤其是行之有效的最小二乘法，最大限度地提高了对手实力对排名的影响。我们的方法应用于六项主要的欧洲顶级足球比赛，发现排名在调整对手实力的权重方面是稳健的。还讨论了一些方法上更简单的替代政策。