Search

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]

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]