ArticlePsychology of sport and exercise2021
Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues.
Article in Psychology of sport and exercise, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 98 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
- Impact of COVID-19 on English Football Premier League: Analyzing rankings and home advantage using extended Bradley-Terry models.PloS one · 2025Article
- Effect of COVID-19 on Key Performance Indicators of Spanish Professional Soccer League.Journal of functional morphology and kinesiology · 2024Article
- Does video assistant referee technology change the magnitude and direction of home advantages and referee bias? A proof-of-concept study.BMC sports science, medicine & rehabilitation · 2024Article
- The Effect of COVID-19 on Home Advantage in Women's Soccer: Evidence From Swedish Damallsvenskan.The American behavioral scientist · 2023Article
- A decade of violence and empty stadiums in Egypt: when does emotion from the terraces affect behaviour on the pitch?Empirical economics · 2023Article
- Soccer's AI transformation: deep learning's analysis of soccer's pandemic research evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- 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
- The Role of Crowd Support on Home Advantage during COVID-19 Restrictions on Italian Football Competitions. Comparison between 2018-19 and 2020-21 Seasons of the Italian Serie A and Serie B Championships.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Impact of COVID-19 lockdown on match performances in the National Basketball Association.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Article
- Impact of absent crowds on technical and physical performances in the Chinese Soccer Super League.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Influence of crowd size on home advantage in the Japanese football league.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2022Article
- Article
- Contextual Variation in External and Internal Workloads across the Competitive Season of a Collegiate Women's Soccer Team.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Home-Advantage during COVID-19: An Analysis in Portuguese Football League.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- No Fans-No Pressure: Referees in Professional Football During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The home advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in football whereby the home team wins more games and scores more goals than the away team. One explanation is that the home crowd spurs on home team performance and causes the referee to unconsciously favour the home team. The Covid-19 (COVID) pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess this explanation for HA, as European football leagues played part of the 2019/2020 season with crowds present and concluded with crowds absent. Using multi-level modelling we compared team performance and referee decisions pre-COVID (crowd present) and during-COVID (crowd absent) across 4844 games from 15 leagues in 11 countries. HA (goals scored and points gained) was significantly reduced during-COVID, which reflected the inferior performance of the home team. In games without fans, home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities and referee-bias was diluted when controlling for the attacking dominance of teams; such that the number of fouls and yellow cards ruled against away sides, while still significant, was reduced and no effects were observed for red cards. Implications for sporting practice and directions for future research are discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.