This paper examines the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional soccer. For that purpose, we make use of a unique "natural experiment": so-called ghost games in the three top divisions of German professional soccer during the Corona pandemic. We find that there is a...

This paper examines the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional football in making use of a unique “natural experiment” induced by restrictions due to the Corona pandemic: so-called ghost games in the top three German football divisions during the 2019/2020 season....

This paper examines the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional football in making use of a unique “natural experiment” induced by restrictions due to the Corona pandemic: so-called ghost games in the top three German football divisions during the 2019/2020 season....

Fan support has often been considered to be a main driver of the home advantage in sports. Using the natural experiment of ghost games during the COVID-19 pandemic in German professional soccer and a dataset of 6,120 matches ranging over the seasons 2011/2012 to 2020/2021, we test this claim....