Football team performance efficiency and effectiveness in a corruptive context: the Calciopoli case

ABSTRACT

Research question: While considerable research on production and efficiency is mostly on all European football leagues, corresponding evidence relating to the Italian Serie A is limited. To address this imbalance, this paper analyses the technical efficiency and effectiveness of Italian football clubs, taking into consideration the impact of the Calciopoli corruption scandal in 2006. This allows assessment of how clubs’ efficiency and effectiveness were affected by the sanctions inflicted on the clubs involved in the scandal.

Research methods: Utilising a panel dataset comprising season aggregated match statistics over ten seasons from 2000/01 to 2009/10, this paper estimates a production function for the league and, then, calculates the relative offensive and defensive efficiency and the football effectiveness of 36 teams. To achieve this, DEA models have been used to calculate the frontiers of efficient production.

Results and findings: The results partially confirm the evidence of the literature but they also reveal how playing style changed, emphasising the importance of attacking play at the expense of defensive play in Italian Serie A. Clubs that suffered a points deduction following their involvement in the Calciopoli scandal changed their usual tactical behaviour, presumably to compensate for the impact of these punishments.

Implications: League authorities should be aware that the clubs’ performance has been affected following the Calciopoli scandal sanctions, which may have contributed to the spectator decline. Furthermore, we identify offensive efficiency as the key determinant of team success, which is a helpful insight for team management with respect to their transfer and salary policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Efficiency
• DEA
• corruption
• Italian football

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Giambattista Rossi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0167-9708

Dries Goossens http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0224-3412

Notes

1 Implemented using GAMS and solved with CPLEX.