integrating balanced scorecard with fuzzy linguistic and fuzzy delphi method for evaluating performance of team sports (sanat naft novin abadan football club)

in the last decades an increasing number of clubs, associations, and partnerships behind professional team sports have become business enterprises as well; as regards their income and number of employees, there are numerous companies managing sports clubs in the medium sized enterprise sector. by nature of being businesses that manage sports, successful performance is usually the number one strategic consideration. an efficient performance evaluation system is essential for controlling, monitoring and improving team sports. this paper explores the use of a management tool: balanced scorecard (bsc), which facilitates managers to meet multiple strategic goals, and fuzzy linguistic method for evaluating team sports performance. bsc is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government and nonprofit organizations. first, twenty-five measures of sustainable performance were recognized through expert questionnaires and through the fuzzy delphi method (fdm), then a model is developed for measuring the acceptable performance of team sports based on the interaction financial, customers, internal business process and learning and growth perspective. after that, bsc structure integrated with fuzzy linguistic is proposed for measuring and improving the quality. the aim of this study was to build a performance evaluation system for team sports and use a fuzzy linguistic to convert the subjective cognition of managers into an information entity and confirmation of improvement.