Team managers and coaches need to choose the best players. The selection relies mainly on the cost and performance of the entire team. It is a common practice that several key players contribute to the overall results of the football team. The quality of players is one of the crucial features determining the failure or success of a sports team. The present article focuses on measuring player efficiency in the Czech and Danish top football competitions during the 2015/16 to 2019/20 seasons. The presented research aims to identify the most technically efficient players, considering their position on the field. The authors used an input-oriented model of data envelopment analysis and subsequently also cluster analysis to determine the best football players. The following article may be of interest to football club managers, football analysts, economists and others interested in the business of football because it combines two relatively simple methods of measuring the efficiency of football players.

Sport has become an important part of our lives in the modern times and sporting sites contribute significantly to the image and texture of modern cities. Regarding the popularity of sport, and football in particular, it has become an important modern place where specific types of economic and social interaction take place. The aim of this article is to propose a method for evaluating the performance of football clubs based on DEA and Malmquist index. Professional Czech football clubs playing in the Czech football competition Fortuna:Liga were selected for empirical analysis. To analyze the relative efficiency of football clubs, BCC and CCR models were employed. The study was conducted on a sample of 20 clubs through 2 inputs and 1 output collected during the 2015/16 – 2019/20 seasons. For some clubs the values of the Malmquist index were calculated. With help of MI it was possible to quantify the total productivity change factor and to decompose it to technological change and technical efficiency change. The results show that Czech football clubs achieved a relatively high level of efficiency in the period monitored and that traditional clubs achieved the highest efficiency score. These results could help club managers improve the performance of their teams.

Football is a popular sport in Slovakia. Every year football clubs spend large sums of money on buying individual players. However, there is a small number of scientific studies dealing with statistical, economic dimensions, and performance evaluation of football players. The performance of individual players, as well as the performance of the whole team, are very important indicators that predetermine the success of the whole club. The aim of this research is to develop a new system for evaluating the efficiency of football players and then apply this system to football practice and identify technically efficient players. The present research uses the data envelopment analysis, specifically the input-oriented Charness, Cooper, Rhodes model and the Andersen-Petersen super-efficiency model. Both models are empirically applied to only one group of football players, namely goalkeepers of the first and second Slovak football leagues in the 2020/21 season. The model proposed in this article attempts to incorporate greater objectivity into making decisions and thus may be an important step in developing a systematic methodology for evaluating not only goalkeepers but also other player positions.

Owning a successful football club is a matter of good management, financial stability but also prestige. Owning a club participating in the English Premier League, the most prestigious and richest football competition in the world, has so far attracted investors from the Middle and Far East, the United States and other parts of the world. The aim of the presented paper was to use data envelopment analysis to calculate efficiency and then evaluate and compare the efficiency of selected clubs of the English Premier League owned by British investors and by foreign ones. The researched period are the seasons 2019/2020 and 2020/2021. The data used were obtained from the official databases of both examined sports competitions and subsequently supplemented with private databases of companies operating in the football environment. In terms of results, some implications for the management of football clubs are discussed and suggestions for increasing efficiency in inefficient clubs are made. Clubs owned by British investors are not generally less efficient than clubs owned by foreign investors and vice versa.

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