Is home advantage lost when football matches are played behind closed doors without spectators? Evidence from top European football leagues in the Covid-19 era Aydın Çelen International Sports Studies 44 No. 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.30819/iss.44-1.06     pp: 65-79     2022-03-30

Is home advantage lost when football matches are played behind closed doors without spectators? Evidence from top European football leagues in the Covid-19 era

Stichworte/keywords: Home advantage, covid-19, crowd support, natural experiments, football

Cite: APA    BibTeX

---

Abstract
When the Covid-19 pandemic reached Europe in mid-March 2020, sport was one of the first activities to be impacted. Precautions taken to limit the spread of the virus resulted in professional football matches being played without spectators. This produced the conditions of a natural experiment enabling the empirical testing of related hypotheses. Using numerous observations from the top European leagues, this study analysed the role of spectators in one of the major phenomena of sports literature - the home advantage i.e., the home team's tendency to win more often than the away team. Strong evidence of the existence of a home advantage both in pre-Covid 19 and Covid-19 periods was found. However, the difference between points earned in favour of the home teams was found to decrease in the Covid period. This was found to be statistically significant when using the Difference-in-Difference (DiD) methodology found in many existing studies. However, alternative analyses 1) using each match as a single observation, rather than adding the away teams in as a control group and 2) taking into account the difference between the performances of the competing teams in previous matches, showed the differences in favour of the home teams with and without spectators to be statistically non-significant. Therefore, it is recommended that in future studies of this kind the most realistic and comprehensive measurement model possible needs to be applied if an accurate picture is to be gained. The conclusion of this study is that, although a decrease in the home advantage was observed when games were played without spectators, it was not sufficient to make a significant difference to that advantage.