Football clubs’ salaries and transfer fees efficiency in Portuguese Primeira Liga

24/11/2022

Association football is the most popular sport in the world and in Portugal. It drives millions of fans every year to the stadiums, to television screens and radios. It is a millionaire industry that draws attention for the gigantic sums of money spent on players’ salaries and transfer fees.This dissertation uses Data Envelopment Analysis methodology to study how efficiently these resources were used between the seasons of 2008/2009 and 2020/2021 of the Portuguese Primeira Liga, as well as trying to explain these efficiency estimates, sports performance and stadium attendance. The results show clubs in Primeira Liga operated in a variable returns to scale environment. While all clubs that made it to European competitions were operating in decreasing returns to scale, all the relegated teams were operating under increasing returns to scale. The maximum player salary of a team is very negatively correlated with efficiency, while the minimum player salary is positively correlated with it. The intra-team coefficient of variation of salaries is negatively correlated with efficiency and, for two of the three models, the Cohesive Theory was proven with a high significance level. In order to maximize sports results, teams should spend as much as possible on players’ salaries and market values (i.e., transfer fees), but, given a limited budget, team’s can maximize their sports performance by being as efficient as possible. What drives stadium attendance seems to be high salaries especially high maximum salary, big estimated market values, big goal differences, wins and inefficiency.

Autores da comunidade :

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  I

  Isaac Alberto Monteiro Felizardo

  ist190656

Orientadores desta instituição:

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  A

  António Sérgio Constantino Folgado Ribeiro

  ist154299

other-engineering-and-technologies - Outras Ciências da Engenharia e Tecnologias

eng - Inglês

Instituto Superior Técnico