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HomeSportHow Covid pandemic robbed football teams of their home ground advantage

How Covid pandemic robbed football teams of their home ground advantage

According to researchers at University of Salzburg, while emotional support from the stands play significant role in home-field advantage, there is "unconscious favoritism" by referees.

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New Delhi: The global Covid pandemic has emptied stadiums of cheering fans, robbing football teams of the so-called ‘home-field’ advantage, according to a new study.

Free of pressure from angry fans, football officials have also penalised the home team with more yellow cards after fouls, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.

As some European elite football leagues returned to the field last year amid the pandemic, researchers at the University of Salzburg, Austria, got a rare chance to study the effect of ‘ghost games’, or those played without large crowds of spectators.

The researchers analysed nearly 1,300 football matches between the 2018-19 season with fans and 2019-20 season without fans, to compare statistics such as the number of cards issued and game results.

They found that while referees in ghost games issued more yellow cards to hometown players for fouls, visiting players, on average, got the same number of yellow cards as before.

Along with this, football teams in Europe’s elite leagues such as La Liga and Premier League lost significantly more of their home games and won more of their away games, when fans did not attend matches.

“We were particularly surprised by the fact that the home teams in ghost games suddenly received so many more yellow cards for fouls,” Michael Christian Leitner, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Salzburg and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The researchers pointed out that the increase in yellow cards was not because of more aggressive play to compensate for losing the game. In fact, overall number of yellow cards for unfair sportsmanship decreased on both sides.

The study concluded that while other factors such as emotional support from the stands play a significant role in home-field advantage, “unconscious favoritism” by the referees appears to be one of the biggest components for why the home team wins more often than not.


Also read: Messi tearfully confirms Barcelona exit, says Paris’ Saint-Germain could be a ‘possibility’


The pressure of the ‘pack’

The research on referee psychology against the backdrop of ghost games helps better understand human behaviour and its consequences.

“From an evolutionary point of view, we humans are pack animals and therefore our decisions depend strongly on our environment, the situation and other people present,” Leitner said.

“By investigating these specific ‘weak points’ in the human psyche—resulting in conformity and biased decision making—we strive to develop effective psychological interventions and countermeasures,” he said.

The team suggests that referees can be trained to manage this psychological pressure using virtual reality technology, where users are immersed in a digital environment through a headset.

(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)


Also read: Germany saw rise in heart attacks during FIFA World Cup 2014, most deaths in final vs Argentina


 

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