IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2105.01446.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Home advantage and crowd attendance: Evidence from rugby during the Covid 19 pandemic

Author

Listed:
  • Federico Fioravanti
  • Fernando Delbianco
  • Fernando Tohm'e

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced almost all professional and amateur sports to be played without attending crowds. Thus, it induced a large-scale natural experiment on the impact of social pressure on decision making and behavior in sports fields. Using a data set of 1027 rugby union matches from 11 tournaments in 10 countries, we find that home teams have won less matches and their points difference decreased during the pandemics, shedding light on the impact of crowd attendance on the {\em home advantage} of sports teams.

Suggested Citation

  • Federico Fioravanti & Fernando Delbianco & Fernando Tohm'e, 2021. "Home advantage and crowd attendance: Evidence from rugby during the Covid 19 pandemic," Papers 2105.01446, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2105.01446
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.01446
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alex Krumer, 2017. "On Winning Probabilities, Weight Categories, and Home Advantage in Professional Judo," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 18(1), pages 77-96, January.
    2. Endrich, Marek & Gesche, Tobias, 2020. "Home-bias in referee decisions: Evidence from “Ghost Matches” during the Covid19-Pandemic," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    3. Fiona Carmichael & Dennis Thomas, 2005. "Home-Field Effect and Team Performance," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 6(3), pages 264-281, August.
    4. Bryson, Alex & Dolton, Peter & Reade, J. James & Schreyer, Dominik & Singleton, Carl, 2021. "Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during Covid-19," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    5. Michela Ponzo & Vincenzo Scoppa, 2018. "Does the Home Advantage Depend on Crowd Support? Evidence From Same-Stadium Derbies," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 19(4), pages 562-582, May.
    6. Page, Katie & Page, Lionel, 2010. "Alone against the crowd: Individual differences in referees' ability to cope under pressure," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 192-199, April.
    7. Christopher J. Boudreaux & Shane D. Sanders & Bhavneet Walia, 2017. "A Natural Experiment to Determine the Crowd Effect Upon Home Court Advantage," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 18(7), pages 737-749, October.
    8. Jones Marshall B, 2007. "Home Advantage in the NBA as a Game-Long Process," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 3(4), pages 1-16, October.
    9. Lionel Page & Katie Page, 2010. "Evidence of referees' national favouritism in rugby," NCER Working Paper Series 62, National Centre for Econometric Research.
    10. Miguel Saavedra García & Óscar Gutiérrez Aguilar & C. Juan Vázquez Lazo & Paulo Sá Marques & J. Juan Fernández Romero, 2013. "Home advantage in Home Nations, Five Nations and Six Nations rugby tournaments (1883-2011)," International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(1), pages 51-63, April.
    11. Cueva, Carlos, 2020. "Animal Spirits in the Beautiful Game. Testing social pressure in professional football during the COVID-19 lockdown," OSF Preprints hczkj, Center for Open Science.
    12. Carlos Alberto Belchior, 2020. "Fans and Match Results: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Brazil," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 21(7), pages 663-687, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Federico Fioravanti & Fernando Delbianco & Fernando Tohm'e, 2023. "Visitors Out! The Absence of Away Team Supporters as a Source of Home Advantage in Football," Papers 2308.06279, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    2. Michael Christian Leitner & Frank Daumann & Florian Follert & Fabio Richlan, 2023. "The cauldron has cooled down: a systematic literature review on home advantage in football during the COVID-19 pandemic from a socio-economic and psychological perspective," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 605-633, June.
    3. Bühren Christoph & Gabriel Marvin, 2023. "Performing best when it matters the most: evidence from professional handball," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 19(3), pages 185-203, September.
    4. Alexandru Nicolae Ungureanu & Corrado Lupo & Paolo Riccardo Brustio, 2021. "A Machine Learning Approach to Analyze Home Advantage during COVID-19 Pandemic Period with Regards to Margin of Victory and to Different Tournaments in Professional Rugby Union Competitions," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(23), pages 1-8, December.
    5. Carl Singleton & J. James Reade & Johan Rewilak & Dominik Schreyer, 2021. "How big is home advantage at the Olympic Games?," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2021-13, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    6. Federico Fioravanti & Fernando Delbianco & Fernando Tohmé, 2023. "The relative importance of ability, luck and motivation in team sports: a Bayesian model of performance in the English Rugby Premiership," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 32(3), pages 715-731, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Federico Fioravanti & Fernando Delbianco & Fernando Tohm'e, 2023. "Visitors Out! The Absence of Away Team Supporters as a Source of Home Advantage in Football," Papers 2308.06279, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    2. J. James Reade & Dominik Schreyer & Carl Singleton, 2022. "Eliminating supportive crowds reduces referee bias," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 60(3), pages 1416-1436, July.
    3. Kai Fischer & Justus Haucap, 2021. "Does Crowd Support Drive the Home Advantage in Professional Football? Evidence from German Ghost Games during the COVID-19 Pandemic," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 22(8), pages 982-1008, December.
    4. Federico Fioravanti & Fernando Delbianco & Fernando Tohmé, 2023. "The relative importance of ability, luck and motivation in team sports: a Bayesian model of performance in the English Rugby Premiership," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 32(3), pages 715-731, September.
    5. Ferraresi Massimiliano & Gucciardi Gianluca, 2023. "Team performance and the perception of being observed: Experimental evidence from top-level professional football," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 24(1), pages 1-31, February.
    6. Mauro Caselli & Paolo Falco, 2021. "When the Mob Goes Silent: Uncovering the Effects of Racial Harassment through a Natural Experiment," DEM Working Papers 2021/01, Department of Economics and Management.
    7. Scoppa, Vincenzo, 2021. "Social pressure in the stadiums: Do agents change behavior without crowd support?," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    8. Yung-Chin Chiu & Chen-Kang Chang, 2022. "Major League Baseball during the COVID-19 pandemic: does a lack of spectators affect home advantage?," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-6, December.
    9. Hiroshi Morita & Shota Araki, 2023. "Social pressure in football matches: an event study of ‘Remote Matches’ in Japan," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(11), pages 1522-1525, June.
    10. J. James Reade & Dominik Schreyer & Carl Singleton, 2020. "Echoes: what happens when football is played behind closed doors?," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2020-14, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    11. Michael Christian Leitner & Frank Daumann & Florian Follert & Fabio Richlan, 2023. "The cauldron has cooled down: a systematic literature review on home advantage in football during the COVID-19 pandemic from a socio-economic and psychological perspective," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 605-633, June.
    12. Sergio Destefanis & Francesco Addesa & Giambattista Rossi, 2022. "The impact of COVID-19 on home advantage: a conditional order-m analysis of football clubs’ efficiency in the top-5 European leagues," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 54(58), pages 6639-6655, December.
    13. Justin Ehrlich & Joel Potter, 2023. "Estimating the effect of attendance on home advantage in the National Basketball Association," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(11), pages 1471-1482, June.
    14. Emmanuel Caiazzo & Claudio Chino & Raffaele Mattera & Chiara Scarfato, 2022. "Social pressure and home bias in football: evidence from Italy," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 42(2), pages 1081-1091.
    15. Pascal Flurin Meier & Raphael Flepp & Egon Franck, 2021. "Are sports betting markets semistrong efficient? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic," Working Papers 387, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).
    16. Luke S. Benz & Michael J. Lopez, 2023. "Estimating the change in soccer’s home advantage during the Covid-19 pandemic using bivariate Poisson regression," AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis, Springer;German Statistical Society, vol. 107(1), pages 205-232, March.
    17. Colella, F. & Dalton, Patricio & Giusti, G., 2021. "All you Need is Love : The Effect of Moral Support on Performance (Revision of CentER DP 2018-026)," Other publications TiSEM aa76dfa7-73db-45d1-8c47-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    18. Kai Fischer & Justus Haucap, 2022. "Home advantage in professional soccer and betting market efficiency: The role of spectator crowds," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 75(2), pages 294-316, May.
    19. Brad R. Humphreys & Alexander Marsella & Levi Perez, 2022. "The effect of monitoring and crowds on crime and law enforcement: A natural experiment from European football," Working Papers 22-08, Department of Economics, West Virginia University.
    20. Seungwhan Chun & Sang Soo Park, 2021. "Home Advantage in Skeleton: Familiarity versus Crowd Support," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 22(1), pages 3-26, January.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2105.01446. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.