Do stadium attendances really influence soccer game's outcome? New evidence from the COVID-19 influence and the playing-behind-closed-door policy

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic began to spread around March 2020, causing European professional soccer leagues to enforce the “playing-behind-closed-door policy,” which banned fans from entering stadiums to watch matches. This enforcement provides us with a new opportunity to study the relationship between stadium attendance and the team performance. Although there is already some empirical research about stadium-attendance demand and team-performance uncertainty in sports economics, some issues remain, such as the censored attendance rate. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of this policy on team performance and players' behaviors. Design/methodology/approach One of the novel approaches is to separate different attributes of home advantage; we study not only the teams' seasonal performance but also the players' performance in each match by adopting the difference-in-differences (DID) method and the regression-discontinuity (RD) approach from the individual team's aspect and single-match-situation aspect separately. Findings We find that teams are sensitive to this policy since playing without spectator presence significantly reduces their home-team advantage in many aspects, such as goals scored, goals conceded, the awarding of yellow and red cards, and the number of fouls. At the same time, expecting fairer calls from referees, home team players substitute major punishments with minor ones, which means being more cautious about receiving yellow/red cards but committing more fouls to compensate for the loss of home advantage. Away team players behave similarly, but their magnitude is different due to the decrease in the away team disadvantage. Originality/value Our datasets contain a larger sample size from several country leagues, with more detailed observation information that possibly influences the team performance and/or players' behaviors, such as team quality, player ability or natural factors. Besides, instead of focusing on the home-team aspect and quantifying the absolute values only, we study both home and away teams by applying the relative measurements as the dependent variables. Finally, we not only study each team's end-of-season performance and players' behaviors during single games by applying DID and RD methodologies.