Description and Analysis of Performance, Potential and Efficiency of Iranian football pro- league by Data Envelopment Analysis

In the case of football it could be argued that the purpose of teams is to win the competitions in which they participated. However, the assessment of football teams from the efficiency aspect would be relevant in judging whether the results have been obtained without waste. The purpose of this research is to compare and analysis of league ranking with Potential and efficiency ranking. The chosen sample is football teams who played in 2009-2010 season of Iranian pro league and the method of calculating the efficiency will be output- oriented version of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In this research, performance, potential and efficiency of each team respectively considered as, The points and ranks achieved by each team in league. The points and ranks achievable by each team and the ratio of points achieved to points achievable by each team.The main conclusion is that the ranking of teams based on performance, potential and efficiency is not the same. performance evaluation system of league that based on sporting results, don’t represent the efficiency of teams. Therefore, it seems, that performance of teams evaluated based on efficiency and with respect to their potentials is needed.