We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players' familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments currently taking place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors. We find large and statistically...

In this paper I explore the flexibility of the work week in the United States, using the FIFA Soccer World Cup as a natural experiment. My empirical strategy exploits the exogenous variation that arises due to which country hosts the World Cup, as this will determine the time games are broadcast...

Using data on about 35,000 professional tennis matches, we test whether men and women react differently to psychological pressure arising from the outcomes of sequential stages in a competition. We show that, with respect to males, females losing the first set are much more likely to play poorly...

We test the soccer myth suggesting that a particularly good moment to score a goal is just before half time. To this end, rich data on 1,179 games played in the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League are analysed. In contrast to the myth, we find that, conditional on the goal difference...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the behavior of referees in professional football and other sports. Referees are typically appointed by a principal to be impartial, especially when unbiased referee judgment is vital for the accomplishment of the principal's objective. Answering...

One of the potential avenues for former professional football players to pursue their career is to become a head coach of a club’s first team. An important question is how to best prepare for such a reconversion. This letter is the first in the academic literature quantifying the association...

We investigate the role of fatigue in soccer (football). Although this issue is important for the "productivity" of players and the optimal organization of national and international championships, empirical evidence is lacking. We use data on all the matches played by national teams in all the...

We are the first to investigate whether the introduction of additional assistant referees in the UEFA Europa League (in season 2009-2010) and the UEFA Champions League (in season 2010-2011) was associated with lower referee bias. To this end, we analyse a unique database with pre- and...

We investigate whether the home advantage in soccer differs by various dimensions of distance between the (regions of the) home and away teams: geographical distance, climatic differences, cultural distance, and disparities in economic prosperity. To this end, we analyse 2,012 recent matches...