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Several recent studies suggest that the home advantage, that is, the benefit competitors accrue from performing in familiar surroundings, was—at least temporarily—reduced in games played without spectators due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. These games played without fans during the Pandemic have been dubbed 'ghost games'. However, the majority of the research to date focus on soccer and no contributions have been provided for indoor sports, where the effect of the support of the fans might have a stronger impact than in outdoor arenas. In this paper, we try to fill this gap by investigating the effect of ghost games in basketball with a special focus on the possible reduction of the home advantage due to the absence of spectators inside the arena. In particular, we test (i) for the reduction of the home advantage in basketball, (ii) whether such reduction tends to disappear over time, (iii) if the bookmakers promptly adapt to such structural change or whether mispricing was created on the betting market. The results from a large data set covering all seasons since 2004 for the ten most popular and followed basketball leagues in Europe show, on the one hand, an overall significant reduction of the home advantage of around 5% and no evidence that suggests that this effect has been reduced at as teams became more accustomed to playing without fans; on the other hand, bookmakers appear to have anticipated such effect and priced home win in basketball matches accordingly, thus avoiding creating mispricing on betting markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a five-year data set including the crowd-less games in the 2020 English, Spanish, Italian, and German first division football leagues and multivariate regression analysis, this paper estimated how fans influence home field advantage. Consistent with previous studies, the estimates showed that in games with crowds, referees gave fewer fouls, yellow cards, and red cards but more penalty kicks to the home team than to the away team. Removing the fans from the stadium eliminated these home advantages coming through referee decisions. Removing fans reduced yellow and red cards given to away teams but did not change cards given to home teams. There was not a similar asymmetry for fouls and penalty kicks. These results suggest that crowds influenced referee judgments about how severe an infraction was more than they influenced decisions about whether a foul occurred. The addition of VAR had little impact on referee decisions and no effect on the home advantage in goal differential. Despite the home bias in referee decisions when crowds were in the stadium, fouls, cards, and penalty kicks played a relatively small role in determining home advantage in game outcomes and most of the home advantage remained after fans were removed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether sports betting markets are semi-strong form efficient--i.e., whether new information is rapidly and completely incorporated into betting prices. We use news on ghost games in the top European football leagues due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a clean arrival of new public information. Because spectators are absent during ghost games, the home advantage is reduced, and we test whether this information is fully reflected in betting prices. Our results show that bookmakers and betting exchanges systematically overestimated a home team's winning probability during the first period of the ghost games, which suggests that betting markets are, at least temporally, not semi-strong form efficient. Examining different leagues, we find that our main results are driven by the German Bundesliga, which was the first league to resume operations. We exploit a betting strategy that yields a positive net payoff over more than one month. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic forced almost all professional and amateur sports to be played without attending crowds. Thus, it induced a large-scale natural experiment on the impact of social pressure on decision making and behavior in sports fields. Using a data set of 1027 rugby union matches from 11 tournaments in 10 countries, we find that home teams have won less matches and their point difference decreased during the pandemic, shedding light on the impact of crowd attendance on the home advantage of sports teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports spectators are one of the factors that affect home advantage. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic created unique conditions under which most of the leagues in the world played matches without crowds for over six months. This situation facilitated an analytical comparison of two different periods: before and during the coronavirus pandemic. The current study sought to examine home advantage in the Israeli sport domain in general, and specifically the impact of the absence of a crowd. The study consisted of 4,030 matches played in Israel's top football and basketball leagues, of which 3,589 took place with crowds from August 2015 to March 2020, while the others were held without spectators from May 2020 to February 2021. Descriptive and analyses of variance procedures indicated a home advantage independent of crowd size, density, geographic region, league level, and type of sport. However, higher-quality teams demonstrated a higher home advantage ratio for the goals conceded. The findings of the study indicate that in the Israeli context, the crowd plays less of a role in home advantage than other potential factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]