Back in January, the problems posed by coronavirus (COVID-19) seemed remote to Australia. Similar viruses such as SARS and MERS had limited impact on Australia, so COVID-19 seemed likely to be of similar significance. It didn’t take long for that to change. By late February the incidence of the virus in Australia was limited, with only 22 confirmed cases, all coming from international travellers or passengers on cruise ships. Government announcements at this stage indicated that apart from practising good hygiene there was no need for the general public to take any additional precautions.
By 2 March Australia recorded its first COVID-19 death and on 8 March, 87,174 fans crowded into the Melbourne Cricket Ground to see Australia defeat India to win the Women’s T20 World Cup Final. This was the largest crowd at a women’s sporting event in Australia. Four days later a woman who attended the final was diagnosed with COVID-19. In light of what we now know about the transmission of the virus, it seems extraordinary that just one case emerged from that huge crowd. Three days later the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic and from then on the world changed. By mid-March the Australia government had placed a ban on all foreign nationals seeking to enter Australia and at that point our international borders were all but closed.
Global sport in lockdown
The WHO’s announcement about the pandemic came just days before the scheduled start of the National Rugby League (NRL) and the Australian Football League (AFL) seasons. On the day before the NRL season opener, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a raft of restrictions on movement and large public gatherings to be introduced the following Monday, but quickly added that he still planned to go to watch his “beloved Sharks“ play their opening game that weekend.
It seemed that the games must go on. That particular game went ahead as planned, but under considerable public pressure, the prime minister changed his mind and did not attend. The AFL season started a week later, but by the end of March both the NRL and the AFL had been postponed indefinitely as Australia’s border closures in response to the rising infection rates made interstate travel impossible. As a result, the national competitions became non-viable.
“One of the most widely recognised factors influencing sporting results is the home-ground advantage. This phenomenon, where teams playing in balanced home and away fixtures tend to win more than 50 per cent of games played at home, has been observed across sports around the world”
The AFL lasted just one round before the shutdown, and with social gatherings of more than 500 people banned, these games were played in empty stadiums. To put this in perspective, in the comparable season opening round in 2019, the attendance at games around the country was 380,159 which is just slightly more than the combined populations of Darwin and Hobart.
Sport around the world, both amateur/community sport and professional sport went into lockdown. The biggest pillar to fall was the Olympic Games that were to be held in Tokyo in July. This was only the third time that the Olympic Games would not be held as scheduled, the other two occasions coming about because of the impact of the first and second World Wars. This announcement further underlined that the world was at war, but in this instance, it was a war with COVID-19.
The lockdown of Australian sport was to last three months and during this time world sport was at a standstill. The eccentric exception was in Belarus where the soccer and ice hockey leagues played on. This was probably not totally surprising given the comments coming from their Prime Minister Lukashenko who described the pandemic as a psychosis and suggested vodka might be an effective remedy! Meanwhile, the eyes of the sporting world turned to clashes between teams unused to the spotlight of world sport such as Dynamo Brest and ZFK Minsk... not exactly household names.
The decision to play on was not universally supported even within Belarus, but as crowds at games dwindled, sport-starved fans from around the world tuned in to live action. In Adelaide, a group of soccer fans adopted Belarusian Premier League Team FK Sklutz, largely because the name amused them. Within a week, their Facebook page, FK Sklutz Worldwide, had more than 1000 followers, and now boasts more than 6000. But apart from those who enjoyed a temporary fix from Belarus, sports fans were forced into hibernation, needing to content themselves with high-rating documentaries on basketball great Michael Jordan and the Australian test cricket team.
Sport, but not as we knew it…
As the world started to come to terms with the challenges of life with COVID-19, and as Australian infection numbers fell, sporting organisations around the world were working to find a way to resume play. One of the first major competitions to resume was the German Bundesliga, the premier soccer competition in Germany and one of the most powerful in Europe. It led the charge with a tentative return to play in late May, but it was not sporting life as we knew it; players were faced with empty stadiums as fans remained locked out.
A month later in Australia, the AFL and NRL were also back in action, but social restrictions meant crowds were either banned or severely restricted in number, depending on state regulations. The normal rhythm of home and away games (where teams play alternately on their home ground and at another team’s venue) was significantly disrupted with teams forced to relocate to work around state border closures and restrictions on movement.
For example, the NRL’s New Zealand Warriors were forced to relocate their entire operation to Terrigal in NSW to get around the ban on international travel. AFL teams settled in to so-called ‘hubs’ with Western Australian (WA) and South Australian (SA) teams relocating to Queensland (QLD) for a six-week period to play games against each other and against the two Qld teams, the Brisbane Lions and Gold Coast Suns.
The early games at the resumption of play were closed events so, for example, when Brisbane played the Fremantle Dockers at their home ground (the Gabba) there was no crowd; it was a home game but with no home-crowd support. In Adelaide on that same weekend, the two SA teams – Port Adelaide Power and Adelaide Crows – played at Adelaide oval in front of 2,240 fans. The last time these two teams met in Adelaide the crowd was 50,544.
The home-ground advantage
While the fans were still kept at bay, the competition was back on but in a dramatically different form. For a range of reasons this was of particular interest to sport psychologists. One of the most widely recognised factors influencing sporting results is the home-ground advantage. This phenomenon, where teams playing in balanced home and away fixtures tend to win more than 50 per cent of games played at home, has been observed across sports ranging from soccer to baseball and hockey to basketball and in major leagues around the world.
For example, in the USA’s National Basketball League, teams playing on their home court win 62.7 per cent of games and in English Premier League soccer, the figure is even higher (63.1%). In the AFL, home teams win 58.3 per cent of the time, but there are variations within this overall trend. When teams are playing at home against a side that has travelled from interstate, the home team wins 61.9 per cent of games, whereas when the two competing teams come from the same state, home teams win 54.1 per cent of games; the home-ground advantage is still evident but somewhat diluted.
So, what is this all about and moreover, what has it got to do with COVID-19? There remains a lack of clarity about the variables that might contribute to this home advantage but interest has focused around the debilitating effects of travel and the consequent disruption to routines, familiarity with the particular playing venue and its idiosyncratic conditions, and the presence of supportive fans who are mostly in greater numbers at home games.
Given the significant disruption to the home-away patterns of the competition, the fixture list in this resurrected season allowed greater isolation of the variables that may be contributing to the home-ground advantage. For example, does a home side playing at home but without fans in attendance still enjoy the same home advantage? When teams travel to play an opponent on a neutral ground is the home-ground advantage still evident? If it is still evident, then this would point to the impact of the travel as this would be the only one of the three prime variables at play, given that the game is played at a neutral venue with little crowd involvement.
In the second last round of the AFL season, Fremantle flew from their hub-base in Cairns to play the North Melbourne Kangaroos at Metricon Stadium on the Gold Coast. This was nominally a home game for North Melbourne, but the presence and hence potential impact of fans was limited (the official crowd was just 308!) and the neutral venue offered no advantage of familiarity to North Melbourne. Experimentally, this effectively isolated just one independent variable – the travel – as Fremantle took a two-hour flight and a further hour of road connections to get to the game whereas the home side had a relatively short bus trip from their Gold Coast hub. Fremantle won convincingly, but it would probably be unwise to draw any inferences from only one data point!
At various stages this season, games have been played where one side enjoyed all three home-ground advantages: venue familiarity, limited travel and strong fan support. For example, Brisbane, Port Adelaide, West Coast, Fremantle and Gold Coast have each played a significant block of games at their home ground, against out-of-state opponents and with significant numbers of home fans. Collectively, they have won 28.5/39 (73.1%) of these home games.
By comparison, when these teams played in ‘neutral games’ (n=31) (where neither side enjoyed the advantages of crowd support or venue familiarity), they won 19 (61.3%) of these games. Finally, they have played a small number of games (n=12) where the opposition were at home on their familiar ground and with fan support, and they have won three (25%) of these traditional ‘away games’.
What can we make of all of this?
These figures suggest that when the three main variables thought to contribute to the home-ground advantage are in play, teams have a strong winning record. But conversely these teams – three of whom are in the top echelon of the competition this year – have struggled to win traditional ‘away games’ where the home-ground advantage variables were stacked against them.
To isolate the effect of fans, therefore, we need to compare games at a team’s home venue both with and without fans. Unfortunately the league’s rejigged fixture did not provide us with this comparison, at least not with sufficient numbers of games to be able to draw conclusions.
However, it is possible to isolate 19 games played in Victoria in the first five rounds of the season where there were no crowds. This allows us to effectively neutralise the effects of travel (all games were between Victorian sides), and fans, as these games were played in empty stadiums. In these 19 games, the home-game winning percentage was just 47 per cent.
This provides an interesting comparison with the home games played this year in front of reasonable crowds of partisan fans where the winning percentage of the home teams was 73.1 per cent. So too, if we measure this against the AFL baseline home advantage of 57.8 per cent (Coventry, 2018).
Again, this comparison needs to be approached with caution in that different teams make up the two blocks of games in this comparison, but having said that, the difference in the winning rate of home teams playing with or without fans is interesting. The figures give some hint that if you take the travel and the fans out of the equation, the home advantage – which would mostly be a factor of venue familiarity – actually drops away.
Similar trends have been observed in Germany in the Bundesliga, where comparisons of games played before and after the lockdown have been made. Their season was halfway through when the competition was put on hold so results pre-lockdown provide a natural control group against which comparisons can be made.
The figures are dramatic. Home teams were winning 43.3 per cent of games before the shutdown (the winning home advantage is lower in soccer than in other sports because draws are a common result), but this dropped to home sides winning just 21.7 per cent (10/46) of games in front of empty stands… or what the Germans call geitserspiele, or ‘ghost games’.
Why do home teams win?
To delve into these results, analysts have looked at factors that may underpin this trend. It appears that in soccer, home teams playing without crowds are less attacking; they score fewer goals, take fewer shots, make fewer crosses, and win fewer corners than when they have crowd support. This pattern fits with what is seen in the AFL teams. Home teams are more inclined to run with the ball, to take marks on the lead and to play on after marking, which are arguably all signs of a more aggressive and attacking mindset.
It has been suggested that when playing in front of supportive crowds, players seek to entertain, are more inclined to take risks, and are generally more proactive. This probably should not come as a surprise given what we know from behavioural psychology. It is relatively straightforward to see demonstratively supportive home-crowds as providing positive reinforcement that may shape and reward assertive behaviours initiated by home-side players.
However, there may be another important factor where the crowds have an impact. The German data points strongly to the impact of crowds on referees. Considerable evidence exists to suggest that referees subconsciously favour the home side, and this has mostly centered on the tendency to award more penalties to the home side and more yellow cards to away team players. However, in the 86 games played without crowds in the Bundesliga, the home teams were given more fouls and more yellow cards than in their home games played in front of supportive home fans.
Similar patterns have been observed in AFL football, where home sides playing against an out of state opposition team (i.e. games where the crowd strongly favours the home side) received 19.5 free kicks per game, while the away team averages 17.5 free kicks. The effect of the crowd on the umpire’s decision making becomes even more apparent when the types of free kicks given are analysed.
As Coventry (2018) explains in Footballistics, “The real evidence is seen in the decisions that might be affected by crowd noise such as free kicks for holding the ball, deliberate out of bounds, or running too far.” In each of these decisions there is sufficient time between the play in question and the umpire’s decision for the crowd demand for the free kick to be heard and be registered by the umpires.
Ex-St Kilda coach Alan Richardson coined the term ‘noise of affirmation’ to describe what he saw as the capacity of the crowd to influence the umpires decision-making, and sure enough, in those rulings where the crowd noise is more likely to intrude on the umpire’s decision-making, the verdict goes clearly in favour of the home team. This is not to suggest that umpires or referees are biased, but simply that they are human; the considerable research on human judgment and decision-making points to the frailty of human judgment and how extraneous factors can influence decisions often without our awareness. It will be interesting to analyse the free-kick breakdown of the AFL games this year where the home teams are playing without crowd support.
None of this will come as a surprise to fans who are adamant that their support helps their side to victory. RB Leipzig’s Tyler Adams summed it up from the player’s perspective:
“But it’s one of those things where you have to dig deep and really try to grind out the results, because to run that extra 15 yards without the fans cheering for you is definitely difficult sometimes. Those are the people you play for, and they give you that extra motivation. In a sense it feels like pre-season games with no fans. It’s a weird vibe in the stadium with the echoes, communication and everything.”
We hear the eccentric bunch of English cricket fans, known as the ‘barmy army’, referred to as the 12th man for the England team and maybe there is something in that. Certainly, they add colour to the game, as do fans across the so-called ‘spectator sports’. When the games were played in empty stadiums the broadcasters resorted to canned crowd noise to give their game broadcast some atmosphere. Cardboard cut-outs of fans were arranged in some stadiums to give the suggestion of crowd support. Football fans have sent TV ratings for AFL football soaring as they seek their fix of their favourite sports.
At the end of the season, when we can pick apart the data from the 306 AFL regular season games plus finals, we may well be able to gain some better understanding of the symbiotic relationship between fans and players. This most unusual sporting environment may also provide us with opportunity to shed further light on the variables underpinning the home-ground advantage.
In the meantime, sport continues to provide entertainment and escape from the restrictions and challenges of living through a pandemic, whether it be through hours spent vicariously cycling through France with the Tour de France, or via the adrenalin charge gained from the frenzy of football that has dominated television screens through this truncated and idiosyncratic sporting season.
Contact the author: [email protected]