A referee is supposed to judge what they see, and for years football has shown a slight bias that usually tilts toward the home team. When the pandemic closed the stands a appeared: tens of thousands of professional matches in Europe were compared, more than a thousand of them played with no spectators. What happened to fouls and cards?
The bias in the decisions faded, and the advantage did not. In fouls and cards, the tilt in toward the home team narrowed or disappeared. in wins fell slightly, and the change was not . Playing at home is not only a crowd; there is also travel, familiarity with the pitch and the habits of a routine.
The work compared many matches from ordinary periods with matches played without spectators, separating two questions: who wins, and how referees distribute decisions.
In the refereeing decisions the change was more consistent: gaps that used to favor home teams weakened when the stands emptied.
In the results themselves the home advantage fell only to a limited extent, not enough for a clear conclusion. There is no contradiction: a crowd can affect officiating while other factors keep the advantage of playing at home.
The pandemic also changed fixture load, travel and how teams operated. So the work strengthens the hypothesis about crowd pressure, and it does not isolate each mechanism precisely.
wat. Empty stands weakened the refereeing tilt toward the home side, and did not necessarily erase home advantage as a whole.
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The role of supporters may show up especially as pressure on referees, even while the home team still enjoys other advantages.
How do we know?
A comparison of more than 40,000 matches, including more than a thousand with no crowd, in models that examined results and refereeing decisions separately.
What is still unknown
Pandemic matches differed from ordinary seasons in scheduling and preparation too; this is not a clean randomized experiment on crowd noise alone.
Learn something?
Where to next
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