An Integrated Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Framework for Athlete Selection in Sport Management: The METE Weighting and SEDAT Ranking Methods

Abstract

Athlete selection—talent identification, squad construction, and boat formation—is among the most consequential recurring decisions facing sport managers and coaches, yet in practice it frequently rests on ad-hoc criterion weighting and single-number rankings whose assumptions are never made explicit. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) offers a principled alternative, but widely used techniques carry structural weaknesses that can distort or reverse the orderings they produce. This study develops and validates an integrated MCDM framework composed of two complementary methods. METE is a loss-framed subjective weighting method that embeds criterion interactions through a relational (DEMATEL-type) structure and guarantees monotonicity between expert judgement and the resulting weights. SEDAT is a ranking method that represents alternatives as a dominance network and fuses thresholded outranking, net flow, and a damped eigenvector (prestige) centrality, thereby avoiding the degeneration and rank-reversal problems of additive aggregations. The formal properties of each method are stated, the core axioms are proven, and reliability and sensitivity analysis are treated as built-in stages of the procedure rather than optional add-ons. The framework is demonstrated on the selection of a rowing crew using a fully auditable single-sheet workbook. A 5,000-iteration Monte Carlo simulation, a Markov-chain analysis of the dominance network, internal-consistency and inter-rater statistics (Cronbach's α, Kendall's W, Fleiss' κ, ICC), sensitivity and cross-method comparisons, and a rank-reversal test jointly show that the results are defensible, reproducible, and stable. Implications for evidence-based, accountable decision-making are discussed for both sport management and sport marketing, where transparent and contestable selection procedures carry concrete governance and commercial value.