A traditional Benders' approach to sports timetabling.

•We propose a traditional Benders’ decomposition approach (TBDA) for sports timetabling.•TDBA resembles first-break-then-schedule and first-day-off-then-schedule.•TDBA can deal with the majority of constraints and objectives from real-life.•We apply TBDA to balance teams’ games over the season, and minimize rest differences.•Using TDBA, we also find better solutions for the travelling tournament problem.