Basic Football Manager?

Assign a number to each team, starting at 1 and incrementing by 1, e.g (1..Arsenal, 2..Aston Villa, 3.. Bolton, 4..Chelsea, 5..Wrexham)

2. If the number of teams is odd, add 1 so that the last number is even. (There is now a team 6 - called a "ghost team")

3. On paper, write out the numbers sequentially. In VB - or any other language bar assembler - create an array of size 6 and assign each number to separate array element, i.e.

0 1 2 3 4 5 <-Array Element
1 2 3 4 5 6 <-Number

or (on paper)

1 2 3 4 5 6


4. To generate fixtures for round 1, pair teams with an equal "distance" from the left and right borders, i.e. the left-most team plays the right-most team, the 2nd-left-most team plays the 2nd-right-most team etc. The fixtures for the first round then reads
1 vs 6 (team 1 - Arsenal - doesn't play in this round)
2 vs 5
3 vs 4

5. To schedule subsequent rounds, keep the left-most number (which is always number '1') fixed and shift all other numbers 1 position to the right. The right-most number "wraps around." Repeat above fixture-generating method. For round 2, then, we get

1 6 2 3 4 5

and the fixtures are

1 vs 5
6 vs 4
2 vs 3

6. The fixtures of every even round should be reversed so that the original home team is away and vice versa. For round 2, then, the games are:
5 vs 1
4 vs 6
3 vs 2


Repeat until you have a complete schedule.

It is mathematically impossible (in non-trivial cases) to have a complete set of perfect home/away sequences, i.e. so that each team play at home then away then home etc. The above algorithm generates near-perfect sequences, though.

This problem is known, by the way, as a Round Robin scheduling problem. If you're mathematically inclined you can always look up "graph colouring" in any decent Combinatorial Analysis textbook.