The use of qualified and correct material contributes positively to the performance of athletes. Therefore, sports club managers and coaches need to choose the materials and suppliers that will provide the best performance for their athletes. The selection of sports material is a challenging task that requires choosing among multiple alternatives, considering multiple criteria that require trade-offs. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques are the most appropriate tool to be used for this purpose. Decomposed Fuzzy Sets (DFSs) and Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets (PFSs) are among the most recent innovations in the literature of fuzzy sets. This study proposes the Decomposed Pythagorean Fuzzy (DPF) - Combinative Distance-based Assessment (CODAS) method, which combines DPFs and PFS, to select the best table tennis rubber for a table tennis club. The decision problem was solved using three different MCDM methods in addition to the proposed method and the rankings were compared. The application results indicate that the presented approach is a robust and practical framework for handling material selection and other MCDM problems.
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