Abstract
It is a fact accepted by everybody that football is the most popular sport around the world. The result of a derby match may be very important for millions of people. Even the time seems to stop on a match day for so many people. Show and entertainment are the most important aspects of football. If soccer players have a high performance, a match may provide pleasure and excitement to audiences. Briefly, the performance and quality of soccer players are the key factors, which draw audiences. Goalkeepers are also one of the important components of football like other players playing different positions such as strikers, mid-fielders, and defenders. Moreover, a goalkeeper can affect the result of a match positively or negatively. Therefore, with the help of a mathematical approach as the methodological framework, it can be seen that the examination of the performance of goalkeepers can be beneficial for decision-makers performing in the fields of sport and the future studies. The current paper proposes an improved integrated multi-criteria decision-making approach to evaluate the selection of goalkeepers; and this model can be applied for goalkeeper’s performance analysis. The proposed model combines the weights of criteria calculated with the help of both the CRITIC and the PSI techniques by applying the weight aggregation operator. It also ranks the decision alternatives by implementing the WASPAS technique based on the final criteria weights obtained by using the weight aggregation operator. In addition, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis consisting of three stages was performed to verify the validation of the suggested hybrid model. It has been observed that A11 has remained the best option for all scenarios. As a result, the results of the sensitivity analysis prove that the proposed hybrid MCDM technique is a very useful, strong and applicable approach. Also, the results obtained by applying the proposed model are accurate, realistic, and reasonable according to the results of the validation test.
Highlights
IntroductionFootball has become an industry; and the numbers of factors and variables affecting success have increased considerably
The current paper proposes an improved integrated multi-criteria decision-making approach to evaluate the selection of goalkeepers; and this model can be applied for goalkeeper’s performance analysis
All data were collected from the statistical database of the Association of English Premier League; and these data were analyzed using the proposed model that consists of the CRITIC and the PSI techniques used for calculating the criteria weights; and the WASPAS methods were applied to determine the preference ratings of the decision alternatives
Summary
Football has become an industry; and the numbers of factors and variables affecting success have increased considerably. This paper proposes a novel integrated multi-criteria decisionmaking model for solving the decision-making problems about soccer player selection. In determining the decision alternatives, factors directly affecting the performances have been defined by the board of experts considering the evaluation of the international football associations about players’ efficiencies. The WASPAS method was implemented for calculating the relative importance values of decision alternatives. The CRITIC and the PSI methods are novel MCDM techniques used for calculating the weights of factors. Even though these methods are new approaches, they are very important tools implemented to solve complicated decision-making problems in various fields. The proposed integrated approach can contribute to literature about the soccer player selection and players’ performance analysis as follows:
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