Using Grey Relational Analysis to Determine the Financial Performance of Turkish Football Clubs

Football has become an important industry in Turkey. A huge amount of sponsoring, advertising, betting funds into football and television rights are sold for billions of Turkish Liras. In order to better compete in Turkish leagues, football clubs have made considerable investments and have aspired to be listed on the stock exchange. The pioneer was Beşiktaş that went public in 2002. After that three football clubs were listed on Borsa Istanbul (BIST). The aim of this study is to evaluate the financial performance of four big football clubs (Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Trabzonspor) listed on BIST from 2009-2010 to 2012-2013. In order to evaluate these clubs, Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) is used. GRA is widely used in various disciplines such as economics, engineering, sociology and finance. It can be used as a rating, classification and decision making technique to determine the important factors among those required for a system with a limited number of data set.