Measuring the Efficiency of Football Players by DEA Model

Football is a very popular subdivision of sports not only in our country, but also all around the world. This article expands the ideas from the economic literature on efficiency to develop method for evaluating the performance of football players that take into account many dimensions of football performance. The evaluation of football players has always been an important input for strategic decisions in the football industry. The aim of this paper is to apply an input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model in order to measure football players' efficiency and to identify the technically efficient players with regard to their position on the field. Efficient players will be further ranked using the Andersen-Petersen super efficiency model. The model is empirically applied to players of the first and second Slovak football leagues in the 2020/21 season. The model proposed in this paper seeks to incorporate more objectivity into decision-making and can thus be an important step in developing a systematic methodology for evaluating football players.