Yorkie Bear

Eerie silence resounds as Germany ushers in football’s new abnormal

Barney Ronay

In the 224 Bundesliga games this season before the lockdown, referees awarded 151 more fouls against away teams and handed out 62 more yellow cards. On Saturday, however, that discrepancy vanished. Indeed, slightly more fouls and yellow cards were awarded against the home teams on average.

We should expect this. As Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, who sat on the board of Athletic Bilbao from 2011 to 2018 and is also a professor of management, economics and strategy at the London School of Economics, points out, referees are unconsciously influenced by crowds.

He and his fellow academics were the first to study how officials were affected by social pressure by looking at stoppage time in La Liga matches. Strikingly they found that when a home team was ahead by a single goal, the referee allowed almost 30% less additional time than average. However, if the home team was behind by one goal the referee allowed 35% more time than average. What’s more, when crowds were larger, the referees become more biased.

There was something else too. When the visiting team scored after the end of the regulation 90 minutes, stoppage time went on 15% longer than when the home team scored. In other words, referees were quicker to end the game if the home team scores, thus giving the visitors less time to respond, than if the visitors score.

In Spain, two teams particularly benefit from refereeing bias – Barcelona and Real Madrid. Though as Palacios-Huerta dryly notes, “most fans would not need an econometric regression to confirm this”.

A Liverpool match against Leicester was examined by a group of referees with and without crowd noise to gauge differences in decisions. A subsequent study looked at what happened in Serie A in 2007 after several Italian clubs were forced to play behind closed doors following the death of a policeman in the Derby di Sicilia between Catania and Palermo. Again the results were significant. The authors found that the typical home advantage in terms of fouls, yellow cards and red cards awarded against the away side all declined dramatically – and that the same referee behaved very differently when officiating the same teams in the same stadium if there was no crowd.

Notably, however, the researchers also found there was “no indication that the players are differently affected in games with and without spectators”.

Another fascinating piece of research examined how 40 qualified referees judged 47 incidents from a match between Liverpool v Leicester. Half watched with crowd noise, while another group watched the action in silence. Those viewing the footage with noise awarded significantly fewer fouls (15.5%) against the home team compared with those watching in silence.

Psychologists call this influence conformity. And you can see how it happens. If 70,000 fans are going to scream at you if you give a decision against their team, it can make referees subconsciously decide to keep the crowd off their backs.

So it comes as no surprise that video evidence has helped reduce home advantage. Before the NFL brought in instant replays, for instance, home teams won 59.6% of matches. Afterwards it dropped to 55.6%. Last season it fell to 51.7% – the lowest mark since 1972. Meanwhile in Europe’s top five football leagues, home advantage has fallen from 49% to around 45% – probably because of a combination of better referees, video replays and less hostile crowds.

Who knows how much further it will fall if sport is forced to continue behind closed doors until a vaccine is found? Either way, we will all be part of an unwanted clinical experiment into just how strange football is without fans – on and off the pitch – for the foreseeable future.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2020/may/18/bundesligas-quiet-return-hints-at-a-silent-threat-to-home-advantage