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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
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Stichworte/keywords: Home advantage, covid-19, crowd support, natural experiments, football
Cite: APA BibTeX
Çelen, A. (2022). 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. International Sports Studies, 44 (1), 65-79. doi:10.30819/iss.44-1.06
@article{Çelen_2022,
doi = {10.30819/iss.44-1.06},
url = {https://doi.org/10.30819/iss.44-1.06},
year = 2022,
publisher = {Logos Verlag Berlin},
volume = {44},
number = {1},
pages = {65-79},
author = {Aydın Çelen},
title = {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},
journal = {International Sports Studies}
}
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.