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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Behav. Econ.
Sec. Behavioral Microfoundations
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frbhe.2024.1488823
This article is part of the Research Topic Sports, Economics, and Natural Experiments: Advances and Retrospection View all 5 articles

HOW (ABSENT) FANS INFLUENCED FOOTBALL DURING THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC?

Provisionally accepted
Luc Arrondel Luc Arrondel 1,2*Richard Duhautois Richard Duhautois 3Baptiste Françon Baptiste Françon 4
  • 1 Paris School of Economics, Paris, France
  • 2 UMR8545 Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques, Paris, Île-de-France, France
  • 3 Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), Paris, France
  • 4 Nancy-Université, Nancy, Lorraine, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The fact that home football teams win more games than away teams has been largely discussed in the literature. Crowd factors appear to be the most dominant cause of this home advantage. At the end of the 2019-2020 season, the Covid-19 pandemic forced European football teams to close their stadium to fans, allowing researchers to exploit this natural experiment to analyze the effects of crowd on match outcomes and referees' decisions.To answer to this question, we used match data played in the top two divisions of four of the main national professional leagues in European countries and Portugal in the 2018-19 and the 2019-20 seasons. We find that the total absence of a generally supportive crowd has a significant effect on home advantage. This results in a reduction of the chances of a home win, a poorer performance by the home team's players, and more severe refereeing decisions towards the home team and less severe towards the away team.

    Keywords: COVID-19, Football, Home advantage, referee bias, Social pressure

    Received: 30 Aug 2024; Accepted: 11 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Arrondel, Duhautois and Françon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Luc Arrondel, Paris School of Economics, Paris, France

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