The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on professional sports, notably, forcing the
National Hockey League to hold its 2020 playoffs in empty arenas. This provided an …

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, European elite football (aka soccer) leagues played the
remaining season 2019/20 without or strongly limited attendance of supporters (ie,“ghost …

Officiating bias is thought to contribute to home advantage. Recent research has shown that
sports with subjective officiating tend to experience greater home advantage and that …

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a natural experimental framework to comprehensively
test the effect of crowds on both referees and players. We examine this from a North …

This study confirmed that without crowds there was no home advantage in association
football during the COVID-19 2020-21 season. Consequently, we sort to answer the obvious …

The present study examines a specific type of referee biases, home bias, and analyzes how
the presence of fans affects home bias by using NBA games played in empty arenas during …

Home advantage is well documented in a wide range of team sports including association
football (soccer). Home team crowd support has been shown to be a likely causal factor and …

Some have claimed that referee and home-field bias in football (American soccer) have
been impacted by the fans at the match. When fans are hostile, the threat referees feel to …

Using a five-year data set including the crowd-less games in the 2020 English, Spanish,
Italian, and German first division football leagues and multivariate regression analysis, this …

The present paper investigates factors contributing to the home advantage, by using the
exceptional opportunity to study professional football matches played in the absence of …