A new hierarchical composite indicator model for ranking the top 20 European football teams

The rankings of football teams are crucial to assess their sportive and non-sportive performances and allow fans and investors to have a measure of the health of the teams. The current literature lacks rankings that jointly consider the economic, sporting and popularity aspects, and our proposal aims to fill this gap. The paper proposes a new conceptual framework with the ultimate goal of building a global ranking for football teams by assessing their overall performance. Therefore, this article applies this new conceptual framework to the top 20 European teams by detecting both four specific composite indicators, corresponding to the main aspects of a football team performance, and the general composite indicator which combines the specific ones into a single index. A reflective model-based approach, based on a higher-order factor analysis, is used in order to build the composite indicators, whereas a multi-group analysis and an analysis of means are applied to test the presence of several models for the performance of football teams in the different leagues, and to test the existence of subgroups with different performances for both the scores of the general and the specific composite indicators.