Productivity drivers and market dynamics in the Spanish first division football league

This paper analyses efficiency drivers of a representative sample of Spanish football clubs by means of the two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) procedure proposed by Simar and Wilson (J Econ, 136:31-64, 2007). In the first stage, the technical efficiency of football clubs is estimated using a bootstrapped DEA model in order to establish which of them are the most efficient; the ranking is based on total productivity in the period 1996-2004. In the second stage, the Simar and Wilson (J Econ, 136:31-64, 2007) procedure is used to bootstrap the DEA scores with a truncated bootstrapped regression. Policy implications of the main findings are also considered.