scholarly journals No Home Bias in Ghost Games

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Alexander Dilger ◽  
Lars Vischer
Keyword(s):  
Home Bias ◽  
Extra Time ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Home Advantage

Because of the COVID-19-pandemic the men’s first German football league (Bundesliga) had to take a break before it was permitted to finish the season 2019/20. However, only ghost games without spectators in the stadiums were allowed in this finishing phase. Comparing these 83 games without spectators with the corresponding 83 regular games between the same teams with spectators before, we find that the normal advantage for the home team disappears. There were 48.2% home wins with spectators and only 32.5% without. This decrease is statistically significant. There were 32.5% away wins before the break and 44.6% thereafter, while the draws increased from 19.3% to 22.9%. However, these increases are not statistically significant. One reason for the lost home advantage is the disappearance of a home bias by the referees, who gave significantly less extra time and also less yellow and red cards to the away team. Keywords: Bundesliga, COVID-19, football, ghost games, home bias

The Effect of the Audience on the Home Advantage

1993 ◽  
Vol 76 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1123-1128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simo Salminen
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Psychological Model ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
Playing Time

According to a social psychological model for the home advantage, a supportive audience encourages the home team to play up to potential, while an unsupportive audience has the opposite effect. The audience's biased behavior results in an increase in penalties on the visiting team. The model was tested by conducting a content analysis of 56 matches shown on Finnish television between July 1984 and March 1986. The content analysis of each match registered the audience's clear reactions ( N = 126), goals, and penalties over a 5-minute playing time. The results did not confirm our theoretical model. When the audience supported the home team, the team scored more points and made more fouls than the visiting team. At the same time, the home team also scored more points when the audience supported the visiting team.

scholarly journals Home advantage mediated (HAM) by referee bias and team performance during covid

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Merim Bilalić ◽  
Bartosz Gula ◽  
Nemanja Vaci
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Team Sport ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
Sport Teams ◽  
Important Player ◽  
Sporting Activities

AbstractThe fans’ importance in sports is acknowledged by the term ‘the 12th man’, a figurative extra player for the home team. Sport teams are indeed more successful when they play in front of their fans than when they play away. The supposed mechanism behind this phenomenon, termed Home Advantage (HA), is that fans’ support spurs home players to better performance and biases referees, which in turn determines the outcome. The inference about the importance of fans’ support is, however, indirect as there is normally a 12th man of this kind, even if it is an opponent’s. The current pandemic, which forced sporting activities to take place behind closed doors, provides the necessary control condition. Here we employ a novel conceptual HA model on a sample of over 4000 soccer matches from 12 European leagues, some played in front of spectators and some in empty stadia, to demonstrate that fans are indeed responsible for the HA. However, the absence of fans reduces the HA by a third, as the home team’s performance suffers and the officials’ bias disappears. The current pandemic reveals that the figurative 12th man is no mere fan hyperbole, but is in fact the most important player in the home team.

scholarly journals Home Advantage during the COVID-19 Pandemic in European football

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dane Jamie McCarrick ◽  
Merim Bilalic ◽  
Nicholas Neave ◽  
Sandy Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
European Football ◽  
Multi Level

The home advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in soccer 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 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess this explanation for HA, as European soccer 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 post-Covid (crowd absent) across 9,528 games from 15 leagues in 11 countries. HA (goals scored and points gained) was significantly reduced post pandemic, which reflected the inferior performance of the home team. In addition, referees awarded significantly fewer sanctions against the away teams, and home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities when they played without fans.

Travel and the Home Advantage in Professional Sports

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 364-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Randall Smith ◽  
Anthony Ciacciarelli ◽  
Jennifer Serzan ◽  
Danielle Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Professional Sports ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Small Influence ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
Sports Team ◽  
The Media

That the home team wins more than half its games is well-established. One factor said to produce this home advantage is travel between venues, which is seen as disruptive for the visiting team. Unfortunately, the media and athletes have been more supportive of travel effects than the research literature. While players continue to speculate that travel matters, empirical results find little support for travel factors. In the present paper we demonstrate that, at least for some professional sports, team travel can exert a very small influence on the outcome of the contest even after the quality of the teams competing is controlled. We conclude, however, that the belief that some factors confer an advantage to the home team is more the product of social forces than the influence those factors regularly have on game outcomes.

scholarly journals Monitoring experts: insights from the introduction of video assistant referee (VAR) in elite football

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Holder ◽  
Thomas Ehrmann ◽  
Arne König
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Home Bias ◽  
Selection System ◽  
Preferential Treatment ◽  
Monitoring Technology ◽  
Incentive Schemes ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Experience Levels ◽  
Ex Ante

AbstractAlong with incentive schemes, another well-established way to align the interests of principals and agents and, consequently, to reduce and eliminate biases and errors is the practice of monitoring. Considering the monitoring of experts, we evaluate the introduction of the most recent monitoring technology in football, the virtual assistant referee (VAR). Focusing on the German Bundesliga and the Italian Serie A, we analyse whether VAR has changed referees’ decision-making behaviour and, in particular, whether this led to changes in referees’ well-documented preferential treatment of home teams. By doing so, we use the introduction of VAR as a natural experiment to examine whether VAR can help overcome inefficiencies in referees’ decision-making and whether it exposes any inefficiencies in the referee selection system. Ex ante (in-)efficiency would imply that few (many) changes in referee decisions are seen after the VAR introduction. Our results suggest, generally, that VAR impacts referees’ decision-making. We confirm current research and conclude that prior to the introduction of the VAR, the home team tends to be favoured with respect to awarded penalty kicks, red cards and the amount of added time in games containing either penalty kicks or red cards. However, because the home bias only partially decreased with the introduction of VAR, it seems that the bias emerges more as a result of the advantages of playing in one’s local surroundings than of the referees’ decisions. We further show that VAR interventions do not correlate with referees’ experience levels. Overall, these modest findings and even non-existent differences indicate that home bias occurs for reasons other than referees, suggesting that the process for training, promoting, and selecting referees at the highest league works well. Finally, our findings suggest that the VAR implementation is aimed at purposes other than classic agent monitoring.

scholarly journals The absence of fans removes the home advantage associated with penalties called by National Hockey League referees

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0256568
Author(s):  
Joël Guérette ◽  
Caroline Blais ◽  
Daniel Fiset
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Ice Hockey ◽  
National Hockey League ◽  
Ecological Context ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Post Hoc ◽  
New Evidence

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on professional sports, notably, forcing the National Hockey League to hold its 2020 playoffs in empty arenas. This provided an unprecedented opportunity to study how crowds may influence penalties awarded by referees in an ecological context. Using data from playoff games played during the COVID-19 pandemic and the previous 5 years (n = 547), we estimate the number of penalties called by referees depending on whether or not spectators were present. The results show an interaction between a team’s status (home; away) and the presence or absence of crowds. Post-hoc analyses reveal that referees awarded significantly more penalties to the away team compared to the home team when there is a crowd present. However, when there are no spectators, the number of penalties awarded to the away and home teams are not significantly different. In order to generalize these results, we took advantage of the extension of the pandemic and the unusual game setting it provided to observe the behavior of referees during the 2020–2021 regular season. Again, using data from the National Hockey League (n = 1639), but also expanding our sample to include Canadian Hockey League games (n = 1709), we also find that the advantage given to the home team by referees when in front of a crowd fades in the absence of spectators. These findings provide new evidence suggesting that social pressure does have an impact on referees’ decision-making, thus contributing to explain the phenomenon of home advantage in professional ice hockey.

The Home Advantage in the National Basketball Association Conference Finals and Finals Series From 1979 to 2019: A Mediation Analysis of Offensive and Defensive Skills

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D. Graham ◽  
Bolun Zhang ◽  
Denver M.Y. Brown ◽  
John Cairney
Keyword(s):  
Mediation Analysis ◽  
Multiple Comparisons ◽  
National Basketball Association ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Mediation Analyses ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This study examined the home advantage effect in decisive National Basketball Association Conference Finals and Finals series playoff games from 1979 to 2019 (the 3-point shot era). We also examined the potential contribution of various offensive- and defensive-based skills and whether these skills mediated the relationship between game status (decisive vs. nondecisive) and outcome (win vs. loss). Overall, we found evidence of a home court advantage with the home team winning 63% of the decisive playoff games and 66% of the nondecisive playoff games. After adjusting for multiple comparisons and regular season win percentage, the home team had significantly more defensive rebounds and steals in Game 5 when trailing 3–1 going into that game. Mediation analyses did not reveal any significant findings when examining the impact of decisive game status on performance through offensive and defensive skills, thus suggesting there are other explanations for the home advantage effect.

Favoritism under Social Pressure

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta
Keyword(s):  
Social Pressure ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Specific Mechanism ◽  
Extra Time ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Professional Soccer

This chapter examines the effect of social forces as determinants of behavior, in particular the role of social pressure as a determinant of corruption, through the lens of professional soccer. First, it shows and quantifies the referee's bias. The premise is that the amount of extra time should not systematically depend on the identity of the team that is leading at the end of a game. Second, the hypothesis that referees show a bias for the home team because of social pressure means that the bias should be stronger when the crowd's rewards from winning are higher. Third, what is the specific mechanism that could plausibly underlie this behavior? The hypothesis underlying this chapter is that it is the actual crowd in the stadium that puts pressure on referees.

Effects of Travel and Length of Home Stand/Road Trip on tie Home Advantage

1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry S. Courneya ◽  
Albert V. Carron
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Regression ◽  
Predictor Variables ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Number Series ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Minor League ◽  
Home Advantage

The present study investigated the effects of season game number, series game number, length of home stand, length of visitor's road trip, home travel, and visitor travel on the home advantage in minor league Double A baseball (N= 1812 games). Initial analysis indicated that the home team won 55.1% of the games (p<.001). Forced-entry multiple regression analyses determined that the combined main and interaction effects of the predictor variables explained less than 1.2% of the variance in win/loss outcome (p>.49). Chi-square analyses revealed that the variable of length of visitor's road trip produced the greatest change in the magnitude of home advantage. When the length of visitor's road trip was cross-tabulated with the length of home stand, me change in home advantage was statistically significant for the home team's later series (p<.05). The implications of these results for the various home advantage explanations are discussed, and future directions for home advantage research are offered.

scholarly journals Does the Home Advantage Depend on Crowd Support? Evidence From Same-Stadium Derbies

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Ponzo ◽  
Vincenzo Scoppa
Keyword(s):  
Home Team ◽  
Season Ticket ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
Levels Of Support ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Support Evidence

We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players’ familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage, we analyze same-stadium derbies (matches among teams that share the same stadium), in which teams enjoy different levels of support from the crowd—the home team has many more supporters mainly because of season ticket holders—while teams do not differ in terms of travel fatigue or familiarity with the stadium. Our estimation results suggest the existence of a sizable crowd support’s effect on the home advantage generated through the encouragement of players’ performance. Furthermore, we find consistent evidence that the support of the crowd tends to bias referee’s decisions (in terms of penalties, red cards, and yellow cards) in favor of the home team.

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