Introduction
The aims of the study are to understand how effective home advantage is in the English Premier League (EPL) and how that changed during the impacted periods where football fans were not allowed into football grounds. Home advantage at the elite level of football has been a well-researched and most often researchers come to the conclusion that home advantage has a significant impact on the results in elite level football (Nevill, Newell and Gale, 1996). Home advantage can be divided into several different factors though, it is important to remember not all teams will have the same home advantage. These factors can be split into things such as team ability, team transfer value, fans and the volume of fans, distance for away team to travel and to an extent how the referee performs in the environment of the home team (Legaz-Arrese, Moliner-Urdiales and Munguía-Izquierdo, 2013). Referees have began to be studied in order to understand if they are being influenced by the home crowd and letting officiating bias effect their performance and the outcome of the competitive result, one study found that referees were having an impact on home advantage due to the amount of penalties being awarded and bookings being handed out that significantly highlighted that they may be being influenced through crowd noise (Boyko, Boyko and Boyko, 2007). The study will also look at how the officiating bias factor changed due to the result of no fans and therefore less crowd noise.
What is home advantage
Home advantage is one the most largely discussed phenomena in sports literature, as the ideology is rather persistent in most sports. Football is often associated with having the largest home advantage of all sports due to the rallying nature of football fans. The largest home advantage found in English football is at the top of the pyramid in the English Premier league. This can be associated due to the crowd volume and density. When managers ask their fans to make their stadium a fortress it is because there is a concrete link between home advantage and home crowd noise. The higher level of noise equals the better results (Shaw, 2015). Home advantage is when a team has a significant change in results when they play at home compared to when they play away from home, home advantage suggests we should see a meaningful set of data that supports this which is what this study is going aim to find out.
A German study into ‘ghost games’.
There has been some research in this field completed in the nation of Germany where researchers studied the top three professional leagues in Germany to see how their results were affected when covid-19 had made its impact and fans were banished from football stadiums. The findings found that there was a significant change in home advantage in the top division, the Bundesliga. However, in the second and third divisions there was a little to none drop off in home advantage and the data remained in the same trajectory as before. The researchers have linked this to the fact that the teams in the lower divisions would be used to playing in front of a lower number of occupants and therefore the drop off of fans would not have had as a dramatic effect as it had on the top division (Fischer and Haucap, 2020). The study also found that there was a change in referees’ behaviour towards home bias which once again can be correlated to the absence of crowd noise. Pre covid-19 the referees gave away fewer fouls and yellow cards to the home team relative to the away team, during the ‘ghost matches’ the study found that referees were treating the home team less favourably as they did before. The results of this study have suggested that referees perform as they do in these environments due to social pressure (Endrich and Gesche, 2020).
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|