And if the ball does not cross the line? A comprehensive analysis of football clubs’ performance

The football club market is changing fast in the social media era. In this global market, clubs must maintain or improve fans’ attendance at the stadium; simultaneously, they need, more than ever, to take care of social media. The aim of this article is to test and discuss a comprehensive approach to analysing the performance of football clubs regarding their multiplicity of objectives. We analyse the efficiency of English Premier League (EPL) clubs during three seasons (2012/13–2014/15). The methodologies employed are data envelopment analysis (DEA) and a bootstrapped DEA model. The input is the market value of the squad, and the outputs are sports results, total revenue, the ratio of stadium utilization during the season and an index of social media impact. The results are robust to alternative estimation methods and indicate that EPL clubs still have a margin for improving their overall efficiency, mainly the medium clubs. The analysis of football clubs’ performance with the proposed comprehensive approach provides a useful tool to help managers with evaluation and feedback considering the actual context of the market. The approach brings closer the opportunity to design appropriate strategies to improve clubs’ efficiency as well as competition policies.