Investment in Signings in LaLiga: Analysis of Sports Directors’ Efficiency

ABSTRACT Objectives This article evaluates the efficiency in professional football related to the financial and sports management of clubs. The study framework is the Spanish First Division in the 2022/2023 season. Methods The methodology applied is a decision envelopment analysis (DEA) that allows analyzing the efficiency in the decision‐making bodies (DMUs) by linking the position at the final table with different variables on the management of the footballers. Unlike previous works, we include a cluster analysis with an efficiency ranking that allows us to know what the common characteristics of these clubs and their sporting and financial strategies are. Results The main conclusion with this proposal is the low rate of average in efficiency, but we consider there are two keys to get high levels of success: the numbers of operations of transferring and applying a polity of zero cost signing new football players.