A shared-input integer network DEA approach linking football teams’ wages and market values

•New shared-inputs NDEA envelopment formulation based in Podinovski [39] applied to football teams.•Football teams considered as a simplified mechanism that assumes that the main path to value creation is through sports results, which should be consistent with the wages paid.•New NDEA structure involving national and international competitions.•New managerial policies are found based on the input and output targets and the efficiencies computed. This paper proposes a new approach, based on an SBI, shared-input NDEA model, to assess the sport and value creation performance of football clubs that are playing in national and international competitions. The novel features of the proposed approach include the relationship between the different sub-processes that make the team transform their salaries into sporting results and these into market value; the computation of inefficiency scores for the participation in the national and international competitions as well as the inefficiency of the value creation stage; and the computation of target intervals for the sports results of the clubs. The proposed approach has been applied to 22 teams, from six major European football leagues that played the UEFA Champions league in the 2021/2022 season.