Do fans impact sports outcomes? A COVID-19 natural experiment
This paper studies the effect of fan attendance on home field advantage in top European soccer leagues. We exploit exogenous variation in the level of fan attendance driven by COVID-19 mitigation policies and find that the home field advantage, as measured by home goals minus away goals, is reduced by 57% across the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, and Spanish La Liga. We find that this leads to a shift in match outcomes from wins to losses with no change in the probability that a match is a draw.
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| Subjects: | |
|---|---|
| Notations: | sport games organisations and events |
| Tagging: | Coronavirus Heimvorteil |
| Published in: | SSRN |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2020
|
| Online Access: | http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3705085 |
| Pages: | 1-35 |
| Document types: | electronical publication |
| Level: | advanced |