A Type-2 Neutrosophic Decision Framework for Outsourcing Provider Selection in Professional Football: Integrating Sports Marketing and Logistics Management

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

This study proposes a decision-support system for professional football clubs to evaluate outsourcing service providers by integrating the WASPAS method with Type-2 Neutrosophic Fuzzy Numbers (T2NNs). Increasing operational complexity, digital transformation, rising fan expectations, and intense competition force football clubs to outsource many sporting and operational activities. However, uncertainties, subjective judgments, conflicting expert opinions, and the dynamic nature of the football industry make outsourcing decisions difficult to manage using traditional decision-making approaches. To address these challenges, the proposed T2NN-WASPAS framework effectively models complex uncertainties and supports rational decision-making processes. In the proposed model, the T2NN is employed to determine the relative importance of evaluation criteria, while the T2NN-WASPAS approach is used to rank outsourcing service providers. The framework integrates sports logistics and sports marketing perspectives by jointly evaluating operational reliability, logistics capacity, technological infrastructure, flexibility, crisis management capability, service quality, brand compatibility, fan experience, and cost performance. A real-life case study involving professional football clubs was conducted to validate the proposed methodology. The findings indicate that logistics capacity, operational reliability, and service quality are the most influential criteria in outsourcing decisions. The results also show that football clubs prioritize long-term operational sustainability and fan satisfaction over purely cost-oriented strategies. The proposed framework contributes to the sports management, sports logistics, and multi-criteria decision-making literature by providing a robust, reliable, and uncertainty-aware decision-support model for complex outsourcing environments.