During and after COVID-19: What happened to the home advantage in Germany's first football division?
Thorsten Schank, Vivien Voigt, Christian Orthey

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSports Analytics and Performance · Sports Performance and Training · Sports, Gender, and Society
MethodsFocus
