Team performance and the perception of being observed: Experimental evidence from top-level professional football

Ferraresi Massimiliano () and Gianluca Gucciardi
Additional contact information
Ferraresi Massimiliano: European Investment Bank, 3, rue Jean Monnet L - 2180 Luxembourg, Luxembourg

German Economic Review, 2023, vol. 24, issue 1, 1-31

Abstract: We exploit the natural experimental setting provided by the Covid-19 lockdown to analyse how performance is affected by a friendly audience. Specifically, we use data on all football matches in the top-level competitions across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom over the 2019/2020 season. We compare the difference between the number of points gained by teams playing at home and teams competing away before the Covid-19 outbreak, when supporters could attend any match, with the same difference after the lockdown, when all matches took place behind closed doors. We find that the performance of the home team is halved when stadiums are empty. Further analyses indicate that offensive (defensive) actions taken by the home team are drastically reduced (increased) once games are played behind closed doors. Referees are affected too, as they change their behaviour in games without spectators. Finally, the home advantage is entirely driven by teams that do not have international experience. Taken together, our findings corroborate the hypothesis that social pressure influences individual behaviour.

Keywords: team performance; home advantage; lockdown; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 J2 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ger-2021-0104 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:germec:v:24:y:2023:i:1:p:1-31:n:4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1515/ger-2021-0104

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().