There are many alternative structures to tournaments for game sports and over time tournaments have revised their structures. In making a revision to a tournament structure, there will be desirable characteristics that must be maintained or improved. Such characteristics include accurately ranking the strongest teams, increased revenue from audiences and sponsors and maintaining or improving player welfare. The purpose of the current investigation was to use the All-Ireland Gaelic Football Championship as an example of how alternative tournament designs can be compared using simulation packages written in MATLAB7.0.1. Desirable aspects of the pre-2001 and current structure of the tournament were compared when relevant progression statistics were accumulated during simulations. The simulation study revealed no significant difference in the strengths of the winning teams of the two tournament structures but did reveal that significantly stronger teams were losing finalists and semi-finalists in the current structure than in the pre-2001 structure. The proportions of winning teams, runners up and losing semi-finalists from different provinces was significantly different to the proportions of all teams that were from different provinces in both tournament structures investigated. This investigation has shown that computer simulation can efficiently provide information beneficial to decision making when designing sports tournaments.
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