Abstract
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 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.
Highlights
In soccer, and other sports that feature eleven field players per team, the fans are often called “the 12th man”, explicitly acknowledging the importance of fans’ support in a team’s success
More than a quarter of these, 1131 matches, were played behind closed doors with no spectators present, which allows us to compare the performance of the home and away teams with and without the presence of the fans within a single season
Most of the 12 European leagues included in the analysis displayed reduced Home Advantage (HA) as measured by points won (Fig. 2, left panel) and goals scored (Fig. 2, right panel) in the post-Covid period compared to the pre-Covid period
Summary
Other sports that feature eleven field players per team, the fans are often called “the 12th man”, explicitly acknowledging the importance of fans’ support in a team’s success. Given that a higher level of testosterone is associated with higher metabolic rate of muscles, in the context of sport this may mean that home players are better equipped for necessary physical aggression and generally more motivated to c ompete[18,22] This line of evidence is consistent with an evolutionary-based territoriality model where these responses are seen as natural responses to protecting one’s territory[18,23]. Self-reports indicate that confidence is higher before home games whereas anxiety is lower[25,26] These physiological and psychological factors are responsible for how much team members exert effort, that is, how much they run, how aggressive and dominant they are, and possibly how well they deal with adversity. Attacking teams may force, for example, the other team to revert to fouling, which results in more warnings for the defending team[32]
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