ArticleFrontiers in psychology2021
Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The impact of crowd effects on home advantage of football matches during the COVID-19 pandemic-A systematic review.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- Asymmetric effects of spectator presence on home and away team performance: a natural experiment from the 2021 K League 1 season.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The influence of removing home advantage on the Chinese Football Super League.BMC sports science, medicine & rehabilitation · 2022Article
- Two Years of COVID-19 Pandemic: How the Brazilian Serie A Championship Was Affected by Home Advantage, Performance and Disciplinary Aspects.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- A Bayesian Approach to Predict Football Matches with Changed Home Advantage in Spectator-Free Matches after the COVID-19 Break.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Influence of crowd size on home advantage in the Japanese football league.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2022Article
- Article
- Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues.Psychology of sport and exercise · 2021Article
- The Impact of Cheering on Sports Performance: Comparison of Serie A Statistics Before and During COVID-19.Cureus · 2021Article
- No Fans-No Pressure: Referees in Professional Football During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2021Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Due to restrictions against the COVID-19 pandemic, spectators were not allowed to attend soccer matches at the end of the 2019/2020 season. Previous studies suggest that the absence of a home crowd changes the home field advantage in terms of match outcomes, offensive performance, and referee decisions. However, because of the small sample sizes, these changes may be random rather than meaningful. To test this, we created 1,000,000 randomized samples from the previous four seasons with the exact same number of matches played behind closed doors in Europe's four most elite soccer leagues at the end of the 2019/2020 season. We found that across countries (Germany, Spain, Italy, and England), performance indices and referee decisions (except red cards) indeed changed to the detriment of the home team beyond the level of chance. However, this overall pattern could be ascribed to specific countries. Most importantly, the proportion of points won by the home teams declined significantly only in Germany, which was accompanied by a meaningful increase in (1) the proportion of goals scored by the away teams and (2) the proportion of yellow cards given to the home teams. We conclude that the home field advantage may indeed be lost when spectators are absent. However, in future studies, more detailed behavioral analyses are needed to determine the robustness and the behavioral determinants of this phenomenon across leagues and countries.
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