A composite indicator via hierarchical disjoint factor analysis for measuring the Italian football teams’ performances

In the last years, with the data revolution and the use of new technologies, phenomena are frequently described by a huge quantity of information useful for making strategical decisions. In the current ”big data” era, the interest of statistics into sports is increasing over the years, sportive and economic data are collected for all teams which use statistical analysis in order to improve their performances. For dealing with all this amount of information, an appropriate statistical analysis is needed. A priority is having statistical tools useful to synthesise the information arised from the data. Such tools are represented by composite indicators, that is, non-observable latent variables and linear combination of observed variables. The strategy of construction of a composite indicator used in this paper is based on a non-negative disjoint and hierarchical model for a set of quantitative variables. This is a factor model with a hierarchical struc- ture formed by factors associated to subsets of manifest variables with positive loadings. In this paper, a composite indicator for measuring the Italian football teams’ performances, in terms of sportive and economic variables, is proposed.