Measuring Efficiency of Football Clubs: DEA approach

Professional football clubs have a special characteristic and that is a combination of sports and financial performances. Currently, performance analysis of football clubs is a useful tool to help managers with evaluation and feedback with respect to the real context of the market. The aim of the presented paper is to use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate efficiency and then evaluate and compare the efficiency of selected European football competitions. For comparison, two European competitions with the potential for similarity were selected from the football environment. They are the Czech Fortuna:Liga and the Danish 3F Superliga. Both competitions are the highest professional football competitions in their countries and were chosen on the basis of the same game model and similar placement in the UEFA league coefficients. The researched period are the seasons 2015/2016 to 2019/2020. The data used were obtained from the official databases of both examined sports competitions and subsequently supplemented with private databases of companies from 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.