Measuring the efficiency of English Premier League football

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this research paper is to prove the superiority of a two-stage data envelopment analysis compared to a one-stage approach in measuring a football club's efficiency. Moreover it provides best practice benchmarks for the research sample which supports football officials to orient themselves to the right clubs. Design/methodology/approach -A non-parametric two-stage data envelopment analysis for the seasons 2006/07 to 2008/09 is introduced to measure the efficiency of English Premier League football clubs from an off-field and an on-field perspective. The results are compared with those of the traditional one-stage data envelopment analysis approach to identify insufficiencies of the latter. Findings -The results show evidence that different conclusions derive from either the one-or the twostage approach with the threat of potential misinterpretations in the case of the former. Furthermore, this study provides football clubs with information to focus on specific efficiency-enhancing strategies at the individual stages of the production process and therefore acts as a supportive tool for the football club officials for setting corrective actions if inefficiencies are identified.Research limitations/implications -The present article provides a foundation for future studies in other football leagues as well as for an intertemporal analysis which evaluates the efficiency of a club on a yearly basis. Originality/value -This is the first paper that introduces a two-stage data envelopment analysis approach in football research. It has proven that it can identify sources of inefficiencies more accurately than a one-stage data envelopment analysis and provides football officials with valuable information about their club.

The win/profit maximization debate: strategic adaptation as the answer?

“…DEA analysis, which has been applied many times in the sport industry (e.g. Guzman and Morrow, 2007;Kern et al, 2012), is introduced to measure the pure…”

“…The attendance objective is sometimes used as a proxy for social aspects of organizational performance when the latter is empirically assessed (e.g. Kern, Schwarzmann and Wiedenegger, 2012). However, social performance cannot be captured by a single indicator such as stadium utilization given its multi-faceted nature, and hence consideration is required of other aspects of clubs' performance, such as the effectiveness of its corporate social responsibility programmes (see, for example, Anagnostopoulos & Kolyperas, 2015;Bason & Anagnostopoulos, 2015;Breitbarth et al, 2015).…”

Efficiency of football teams from an organisation management perspective

“…There is abundant literature in which efficiency in the use of resources by football teams is calculated using DEA. Examples are the studies by Haas (, 200b), Haas, Kocher, and Sutter (), Espitia‐Escuer and García‐Cebrián (, , , ), Guzmán (), García‐Sánchez (), Boscà, Liern, Martínez, and Sala (), González‐Gómez and Picazo‐Tadeo (), Kern, Schwarzmann, and Wiedenegger (), Papahristodoulou (), and Villa and Lozano ().…”

“…For example, Guzmán () uses turnover as the output, and Haas (, ), Haas et al (), and Kern et al () use variables representing sports results together with another combination of variables, which, depending on the study, include attendance, income, or stadium usage rate. As for the variables, the aforementioned studies consider to represent consumed resources; Guzmán () uses staff costs and overheads, Haas () and Haas et al () use salaries, Haas () adds the population of the city where the team plays to salaries, and Kern et al () use salaries, expenses caused by player transfers, and the team's market value. The work by González‐Gómez and Picazo‐Tadeo () only uses variables related to sporting success to represent output, but they considered the number of players available in the season and variables related to the team's financial capacity as inputs.…”

Clustering functional data streams: Unsupervised classification of soccer top players based on Google trends

“…As a consequence, many people follow football because they are fans of a player rather than of a soccer team. Thus, the acquisition of certain players may increase the interest around a team, number of subscribed fans and sold tickets, television rights, incomes from merchandising (football shirts, signed objects, gadgets, etc), and investors from foreign countries …”