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.

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 The (Missing) 12th Man: Home Advantage Mediated (HAM) by Referee Bias and Team Performance During Covid

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

The 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 4,000 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 Bayesian analysis of home advantage in North American professional sports before and during COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nico Higgs ◽  
Ian Stavness
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Negative Binomial ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
American Football ◽  
Return To Play ◽  
The North ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
European Football ◽  
Sports Leagues ◽  
Multi Level

AbstractHome advantage in professional sports is a widely accepted phenomenon despite the lack of any controlled experiments at the professional level. The return to play of professional sports during the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to analyze the hypothesized effect of home advantage in neutral settings. While recent work has examined the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on home advantage in European football, comparatively few studies have examined the effect of restrictions in the North American professional sports leagues. In this work, we infer the effect of and changes in home advantage prior to and during COVID-19 in the professional North American leagues for hockey, basketball, baseball, and American football. We propose a Bayesian multi-level regression model that infers the effect of home advantage while accounting for relative team strengths. We also demonstrate that the Negative Binomial distribution is the most appropriate likelihood to use in modelling North American sports leagues as they are prone to overdispersion in their points scored. Our model gives strong evidence that home advantage was negatively impacted in the NHL and NBA during their strongly restricted COVID-19 playoffs, while the MLB and NFL showed little to no change during their weakly restricted COVID-19 seasons.

scholarly journals The Behaviour of Home Advantage during the COVID-19 Pandemic in European Rink Hockey Leagues

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 228
Author(s):  
Jordi Arboix-Alió ◽  
Guillem Trabal ◽  
Bernat Buscà ◽  
Javier Peña ◽  
Adrià Arboix ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Regression Models ◽  
Negative Binomial ◽  
Negative Binomial Regression ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Performance Factors ◽  
Binomial Regression ◽  
Crowd Behaviour ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
Performance Analyses

The primary purpose of the present study was to compare the home advantage (HA) and the home team performance in the most relevant European rink hockey leagues (Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), considering the presence or absence of spectators in the competition venues due to the effect of COVID-19 restrictions. The sample was composed of 1665 rink hockey matches (654 from the Spanish league, 497 from the Portuguese league, and 514 from the Italian league) played between the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 seasons. The HA and match variables comparisons were established using several negative binomial regression models. Results showed that the effect of HA did not disappear despite playing without spectators but decreased from 63.99% to 57.41% (p = 0.002). Moreover, the comparison of the match variables showed that playing with spectators benefited local teams’ performance, especially in the Portuguese and Italian leagues. Playing with spectators favoured local team performance in rink hockey matches, which is more evident in some analysed leagues. However, as HA does not disappear entirely without spectators, it is necessary to study other relevant performance factors that are not directly or indirectly attributable to crowd behaviour in rink hockey performance analyses.

scholarly journals Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues

2021 ◽  
pp. 102013
Author(s):  
Dane McCarrick ◽  
Merim Bilalic ◽  
Nick Neave ◽  
Sandy Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
Home Advantage ◽  
European Football

scholarly journals Machine Learning in Football Betting: Prediction of Match Results Based on Player Characteristics

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Stübinger ◽  
Benedikt Mangold ◽  
Julian Knoll
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Ensemble Strategy ◽  
The World ◽  
European Football ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Football Betting ◽  
Betting Odds

In recent times, football (soccer) has aroused an increasing amount of attention across continents and entered unexpected dimensions. In this course, the number of bookmakers, who offer the opportunity to bet on the outcome of football games, expanded enormously, which was further strengthened by the development of the world wide web. In this context, one could generate positive returns over time by betting based on a strategy which successfully identifies overvalued betting odds. Due to the large number of matches around the globe, football matches in particular have great potential for such a betting strategy. This paper utilizes machine learning to forecast the outcome of football games based on match and player attributes. A simulation study which includes all matches of the five greatest European football leagues and the corresponding second leagues between 2006 and 2018 revealed that an ensemble strategy achieves statistically and economically significant returns of 1.58% per match. Furthermore, the combination of different machine learning algorithms could neither be outperformed by the individual machine learning approaches nor by a linear regression model or naive betting strategies, such as always betting on the victory of the home team.

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 How does spectator presence affect football? Home advantage remains in European top-class football matches played without spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0248590
Author(s):  
Fabian Wunderlich ◽  
Matthias Weigelt ◽  
Robert Rein ◽  
Daniel Memmert
Keyword(s):  
Driving Factor ◽  
Professional Football ◽  
Home Advantage ◽  
European Football

The present paper investigates factors contributing to the home advantage, by using the exceptional opportunity to study professional football matches played in the absence of spectators due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. More than 40,000 matches before and during the pandemic, including more than 1,000 professional matches without spectators across the main European football leagues, have been analyzed. Results support the notion of a crowd-induced referee bias as the increased sanctioning of away teams disappears in the absence of spectators with regard to fouls (p < .001), yellow cards (p < .001), and red cards (p < .05). Moreover, the match dominance of home teams decreases significantly as indicated by shots (p < .001) and shots on target (p < .01). In terms of the home advantage itself, surprisingly, only a non-significant decrease is found. While the present paper supports prior research with regard to a crowd-induced referee bias, spectators thus do not seem to be the main driving factor of the home advantage. Results from amateur football, being naturally played in absence of a crowd, provide further evidence that the home advantage is predominantly caused by factors not directly or indirectly attributable to a noteworthy number of spectators.

scholarly journals The Effect of the First Goal on Match Score in Football for the Home Field Advantage

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Tuğbay Inan ◽  
Beyza Cetin ◽  
Ozge Gungorur
Keyword(s):  
Sport Management ◽  
Football Players ◽  
Statistical Research ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Sports Industry ◽  
Package Program ◽  
European Football ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The interest in sports in the world is increasing in parallel with the developments in communication technology, . As a result of this increase, the number of researches conducted on sports industry and sport management has also showed an increase. The field of sport that attracts the most attention worldwide is football. Data analysis and statistical research are also included in football researches in this field of sports that intertwines with different fields of science such as football management, finance and sports industry. In addition to the econometric measurement methods on the related researches, the variables affecting the results of the competition and the statistical analyzes that determine the impact strength of these variables are more abundant in the literature. As a result of the competitions, the variables affecting the results of a competition attract the attention of football players, technical team, fans, media organizations and sports managers. When it comes to this study,  it was planned to statistically determine the effect of the first goal in the European football leagues on the results of the match. From 5 countries in Europe Spain, France, Germany, England and Italy in particular, data belonging to the matches of the teams in which they were the home team between 2014-2017 seasons was used. A total of 5478 matches were analyzed in which 1140 matches were from Spain,  918 from Germany, 1140 from France, 1140 from England and 1140 from Italy. The relationship between the first goal and the match result was determined by the chi-square independence test. SPSS 24.0 package program was used in the analysis. The first goal independent variable in the study was examined and it was found that there was a relationship between the first goal and the match results (p <0.05). As far as  results of the research data are concerned, it was found that there was a relationship between the first goal scored and the match results  of the 5 major European  football leagues when the teams were the home teams  during the three seasons. Accordingly, the importance of the first goal was demonstrated by this study.

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