During and after COVID-19: What happened to the home advantage in Germany's first football division?

TL;DR

This study examines how the absence and return of spectators during COVID-19 affected home advantage in Germany's Bundesliga, revealing a temporary disappearance and subsequent adaptation of home team benefits over multiple seasons.

Contribution

It provides a long-term analysis of home advantage changes across multiple seasons, incorporating varying spectator regulations and stadium utilization levels.

Findings

Home advantage disappeared in the last nine matches of 2019/20 season.

Home advantage returned to near pre-COVID levels in 2020/21 despite spectator bans.

A U-shaped relationship exists between home advantage and stadium utilization rate.

Abstract

It is well-established that the home advantage (HA), the phenomenon that on average the local team performs better than the visiting team, exists in many sports. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, spectators were banned from football stadiums, which we leverage as a natural experiment to examine the impact of stadium spectators on HA. Using data from the first division of the German Bundesliga for seasons 2016/17 to 2023/24, we are the first to focus on a longer time horizon and consider not only the first but all three seasons subject to spectator regulations as well as two subsequent seasons without. We confirm previous studies regarding the disappearance of the HA in the last nine matches of season 2019/20. This drop materialised almost entirely through a reduction of home goals. The HA in season 2020/21 (with spectator ban during most matches) was very close to the pre-COVID-19 season 2018/19, indicating that teams became accustomed to the absence of spectators. For season 2021/22, with varying spectator regulations, we detect a U-shaped relationship between HA and the stadium utilisation rate, where HA increases considerably for matches with medium stadium utilisation which is associated with a larger difference in running distance between the home and away teams.