Abstract
The home advantage (HA) affects football competitions, especially due to the presence of crowd support. Even though several studies demonstrated that HA (which is influenced by the crowd) decreased in recent years, the empty stadia caused by COVID-19 restrictions offered unique situations to explore and quantify HA. For this reason, we aimed to assess HA in two seasons of the major Italian Championships. We conducted an observational study with the data from the last three seasons of the Italian football championship A–B series, analyzing a total of 2.964 individual game scores. To quantify the HA, the number of points won at home was calculated as a percentage of the total number of points won, home and away. In every season and for every team classification, HA was found (scored points > 50% in home matches). We reported a difference in HA median score for Serie B. Additionally, a difference was found in Serie A for middle-ranking HA median scores in the two seasons compared (p-value = 0.017), which was similarly found in Serie B (p-value = 0.009). The number of penalties was lower in the season with a crowd compared to one without a crowd (p = 0.001). The HA did not disappear in empty stadiums, so there must be other contributing factors. Additionally, we found that the referees were biased by the presence of the crowd in favor of the home teams, and this result could be considered by the football association during referees’ training and formation.
Highlights
The home advantage (HA) is described as the home team winning 50% or more of the games they have played in [1]
Even if HA was influenced by several variables and these variables interacted with each other, the empty stadia due to the restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to explore and to quantify the effect of fan support in HA and how it changed across years in the two major Italian championships, Series A and Serie B (2018–2019 with the crowd; 2020–2021 without crowd)
Our results confirm previous results with a significant decrease in HA in 20–21 compared to 18–19 (p = 0.002) for Serie B; instead, in Serie A, even if there was a change in HA, this was not statistically significant (p > 0.05), which could have been caused by the difference in the level and the experience between players of the two championships, in which the lower-level championship players could suffer more from the influence of a crowd
Summary
The home advantage (HA) is described as the home team winning 50% or more of the games they have played in [1]. Several variables interact with each other and greatly influence the increase in HA; in accordance with the literature, one of the main variables decisive in the increase in HA is the fans’ support, and its changes between home and away matches [17,18] It seems that the HA is influenced by a crowd size of up to 20,000; in Australian football, the HA effect was found to only increase with crowd size up to 20,000 visitors [19]. Sports events were affected, and one of the major and persistent restrictions was the absence of crowds during all individual and team-sport competitions, called door-blinded competitions These unique situations caused by COVID-19 restrictions allowed us to observe the importance of fans’ support on the increase (or not) in the HA during major football competitions
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