About this article
Published Online: Apr 25, 2022
Page range: 56 - 67
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ceej-2022-0004
Keywords
© 2022 Paweł Strawiński et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
The COVID-19 pandemic swept fans out of the stadiums, but matches continued to be played in most major football leagues. We make use of this natural experiment to investigate if home field advantage disappears when the home team is not supported by the fans. Focusing on four top European football leagues, we find such an effect in the Bundesliga only. We propose that this singularity may be related to the special role that the fan associations play in German football.