Corona Daily 065: Football without Fans

With noticeable delay, Euro 2020, the European football championship begins today. It is likely to have fans in the stadium, though the virus cases scoreboard may change that. For the first time, VAR (video assistant referee) system has been introduced.

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Big sport earns its revenue from TV advertising rather than gate receipts. Historically, spectators at the stadium were critical for most sports. In the pandemic, notwithstanding the risks, football and cricket tournaments were conducted in empty stadiums. Fake pre-taped crowd cheering was added in the mix for the TV viewers. Though the players and devotees of the game were frustrated, researchers were delighted at this unique opportunity.

Among others, studies tried to answer the question: why do home teams tend to win more? One of the suspected causes was the bias of the referee.

Researchers found that with crowds, referees penalize home teams less. Without fans, this bias disappeared. In one experiment, officials were shown past recorded games and asked how they would have ruled. When the crowd noise was on, they were kinder to the home team. When the sound was muted, they were more objective.

One paper published last year found that in the pandemic’s empty stadiums, the home team’s edge vanished. Referees gave similar number of cards for fouls to both sides, and visitors won as often as the hosts. A study commissioned by the Economist analysed 1,534 matches without fans in 2020. The total number of cards received by the home team went up from 46% pre-pandemic to 50%. (You may think this is close, but 46% for the home team meant 54% for the visitors).

Other than cards, in normal times, home teams received more injury time. When home teams were leading, injury time became shorter.

An earlier Italian research (in 2007, Italy had banned spectators for their behavior) noted that the same referees officiating in a game between the same two teams at the same venue behaved dramatically differently when spectators were present versus when no one was watching.

It is not because referees are biased or corrupt, but because they are human. They get carried away by the crowd pressure, often without realizing it.

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The latest Economist mentions another study that is even more interesting.

Fabrizio Colella, an economics graduate student researched the impact of racism on players with and without fans. (I wonder why many football researchers are Italian). For each player in Serie A, the top tier of Italian football, Fabrizio compiled individual performance scores for the last two years. The performance was rated on the scale of one to ten, taking into account many aspects including goals and assists. He classified over 500 players into white and non-white. For each of these players, he compared how they fared, on average, when performing before fans and in empty stadiums.

On average, white players scored worse without fans than in packed stadiums. The non-white players’ performance metric improved significantly. The researcher built a mathematical model to look for other variables, such as player’s nationality or the quality of the team. However, the only thing that stood out was skin colour. It seems the racial chants that are common in football stadiums affect the black players more than the white players. In fact, the study found that the effect was greater for the darkest-skinned players than for brown or olive-skinned ones.

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This month, Romelu Lakaku, a striker in the Belgium team said that racism in football right now is at an all-time high. Euro 2020 that starts today will bring back the fans to the stadiums and inevitably racial abuse as well.

The Video assistant referee may be able to reduce the bias of the on-field referee. But no solution is in sight for the football hooligans and their racist chanting.

Ravi