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...

The support of home spectators is one of the contributing factors to the home advantage effect in sports matches. The Covid-19 pandemic led to European soccer matches being played without spectators. We show that betting markets adjusted swiftly to account for a reduced home advantage in both...

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....

We compare the properties of betting market odds set in two distinct markets for a large sample of European soccer matches. We confirm inefficiencies in the traditional market for bets on a home win, an away win or a draw as found in previous studies such as Angelini and De Angelis (2019), in...