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Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?

Due to restrictions against the COVID-19 pandemic, spectators were not allowed to attend soccer matches at the end of the 2019/2020 season. Previous studies suggest that the absence of a home crowd changes the home field advantage in terms of match outcomes, offensive performance, and referee decisi...

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Autores principales: Hill, Yannick, Van Yperen, Nico W.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8081822/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33935917
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658452
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author Hill, Yannick
Van Yperen, Nico W.
author_facet Hill, Yannick
Van Yperen, Nico W.
author_sort Hill, Yannick
collection PubMed
description Due to restrictions against the COVID-19 pandemic, spectators were not allowed to attend soccer matches at the end of the 2019/2020 season. Previous studies suggest that the absence of a home crowd changes the home field advantage in terms of match outcomes, offensive performance, and referee decisions. However, because of the small sample sizes, these changes may be random rather than meaningful. To test this, we created 1,000,000 randomized samples from the previous four seasons with the exact same number of matches played behind closed doors in Europe’s four most elite soccer leagues at the end of the 2019/2020 season. We found that across countries (Germany, Spain, Italy, and England), performance indices and referee decisions (except red cards) indeed changed to the detriment of the home team beyond the level of chance. However, this overall pattern could be ascribed to specific countries. Most importantly, the proportion of points won by the home teams declined significantly only in Germany, which was accompanied by a meaningful increase in (1) the proportion of goals scored by the away teams and (2) the proportion of yellow cards given to the home teams. We conclude that the home field advantage may indeed be lost when spectators are absent. However, in future studies, more detailed behavioral analyses are needed to determine the robustness and the behavioral determinants of this phenomenon across leagues and countries.
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spelling pubmed-80818222021-04-30 Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance? Hill, Yannick Van Yperen, Nico W. Front Psychol Psychology Due to restrictions against the COVID-19 pandemic, spectators were not allowed to attend soccer matches at the end of the 2019/2020 season. Previous studies suggest that the absence of a home crowd changes the home field advantage in terms of match outcomes, offensive performance, and referee decisions. However, because of the small sample sizes, these changes may be random rather than meaningful. To test this, we created 1,000,000 randomized samples from the previous four seasons with the exact same number of matches played behind closed doors in Europe’s four most elite soccer leagues at the end of the 2019/2020 season. We found that across countries (Germany, Spain, Italy, and England), performance indices and referee decisions (except red cards) indeed changed to the detriment of the home team beyond the level of chance. However, this overall pattern could be ascribed to specific countries. Most importantly, the proportion of points won by the home teams declined significantly only in Germany, which was accompanied by a meaningful increase in (1) the proportion of goals scored by the away teams and (2) the proportion of yellow cards given to the home teams. We conclude that the home field advantage may indeed be lost when spectators are absent. However, in future studies, more detailed behavioral analyses are needed to determine the robustness and the behavioral determinants of this phenomenon across leagues and countries. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-04-15 /pmc/articles/PMC8081822/ /pubmed/33935917 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658452 Text en Copyright © 2021 Hill and Van Yperen. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/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) and the copyright owner(s) 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.
spellingShingle Psychology
Hill, Yannick
Van Yperen, Nico W.
Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
title Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
title_full Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
title_fullStr Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
title_full_unstemmed Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
title_short Losing the Home Field Advantage When Playing Behind Closed Doors During COVID-19: Change or Chance?
title_sort losing the home field advantage when playing behind closed doors during covid-19: change or chance?
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8081822/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33935917
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658452
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