During and after COVID-19: What happened to the home advantage in Germany's first football division? (2411.12509v1)

Abstract: It is well-established that the home advantage (HA), the phenomenon that on average the local team performs better than the visiting team, exists in many sports. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, spectators were banned from football stadiums, which we leverage as a natural experiment to examine the impact of stadium spectators on HA. Using data from the first division of the German Bundesliga for seasons 2016/17 to 2023/24, we are the first to focus on a longer time horizon and consider not only the first but all three seasons subject to spectator regulations as well as two subsequent seasons without. We confirm previous studies regarding the disappearance of the HA in the last nine matches of season 2019/20. This drop materialised almost entirely through a reduction of home goals. The HA in season 2020/21 (with spectator ban during most matches) was very close to the pre-COVID-19 season 2018/19, indicating that teams became accustomed to the absence of spectators. For season 2021/22, with varying spectator regulations, we detect a U-shaped relationship between HA and the stadium utilisation rate, where HA increases considerably for matches with medium stadium utilisation which is associated with a larger difference in running distance between the home and away teams.