Measuring efficiency and productivity in professional football teams: evidence from the English Premier League

Professional football clubs are unusual businesses, their performance judged on and off the field of play. This study is concerned with measuring the efficiency of clubs in the English Premier League. Information from clubs’ financial statements is used as a measure of corporate performance. To measure changes in efficiency and productivity the Malmquist non-parametric technique has been used. This is derived from the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) linear programming approach, with Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) being used to ensure the cohesion of the input–output variables. The study concludes that while clubs operate close to efficient levels for the assessed models, there is limited technological advance in their performance in terms of the displacement of the technological frontier.