Ranking football teams with AHP and TOPSIS methods

Abstract

Managers continually seek improved methods to measure the performance of their organisations because they are committed to improve efficiency and effectiveness in their operating units. The sporting performance of professional football teams has often been assessed considering their results in the major regular competition, namely the national league. On the other hand, ranking teams is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. Therefore by taking data for the season 1999/2000 from Haas et al. (2004) we study the efficiency of football teams in the German Bundesliga by MCDM techniques. Based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order preferences by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), this paper applies an MCDM approach to evaluate the performance of football teams in the German Bundesliga. The non-parametric Spearman test of relationship (rs) and the Kendall’s Tau test (τ) of correlation verify the results of DEA and TOPSIS.