Organisational efficiency of national football leagues in Europe

Résumé En

Research question: National football leagues are organisations with multidimensional and idiosyncratic objectives according to one train of thought among the theories of organisational management. Starting from this standpoint, the paper aims at providing an analytical framework for empirically assessing sport leagues organisational performance across several European countries and comparing them in terms of their organisational efficiency.Research methods: The novelty consists in using at league level a methodology – a Data Envelopment Analysis – which has been confined so far to the study of club efficiency in the existing literature. The league sample is limited to 36 observable leagues out of 55 UEFA member leagues over 2010–2015 due to data paucity.Results and findings: Efficiency scores, checked with several robustness tests, exhibit a scattered efficiency across European football leagues. Part of the observed inefficiency is linked to decreasing returns to scale, the rest being due to purely inefficient management. The paper also provides a delineation of peer efficiency groups for each league under evaluation.Implications: There is a managerial recommendation to use peer groups as international benchmarks for improving football leagues’ efficiency. Benchmarking best practices may assist the less well-performing leagues in signalling to them which other leagues’ experience could be an example to follow on their path toward organisational improvement.