Procedure for Implementing Data Envelopment Analysis as a Methodology for Measuring Efficiency. Application to Football Teams

This work is didactic in purpose and it aims to provide a mechanism to help apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as an effective tool to measure efficiency. Using works by Golany and Roll (1989), Norman and Stoker (1991), Triantis (2004) and Cook, Tone and Zhu (2014) as a basis, we propose a five-stage process to that end, which serves as a guide to clarify relevant questions on the usefulness of knowledge of efficiency, the DEA model to apply and representative input and output variables.One of the football competitions is used as an example of applying the proposed procedure. Sports in general and football in particular are labor-intensive activities and the lack of a standardized productive process makes it difficult to apply accurate recommendations on the amount of productive resources to use in these processes so they can be classified as efficient. On the other hand, in the literature we can observe the application of sophisticated DEA versions whose results might not correspond to the utilization that sport teams could make of the knowledge of their efficiency values