Evaluation of Football Players’ Performance Based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Approach and Sensitivity Analysis

The use of information systems and recommendation models in football has become a popular way to improve performance. With their help, it is possible to make more informed and effective decisions in terms of team management, the selection of training parameters, or the building of player line-ups. To this end, in this paper, we propose a decision model based on the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach to assess defensive football players regarding overall and defense skills. The model was examined with selected objective weighting techniques and MCDA methods to comprehensively analyze the potential footballers’ performance scores. A sensitivity analysis is performed to indicate what factors of the game the players should be focusing on throughout the season to increase the evaluation score of their performance and, thus, be a more attractive choice to clubs’ managers. The results from the sensitivity analysis show that improving the performance regarding particular criteria can significantly improve the evaluation score of the players.