The Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee announced on Wednesday that tickets to the games will no longer be sold to the general public because of COVID-19.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, European elite football (soccer) leagues played the remaining season 2019/20 without or strongly limited attendance of supporters (i.e., “ghost games”). From a sport psychological perspective this situation poses a unique opportunity to investigate the crowd’s influence on referee decisions and the associated effect of “home advantage”. A total of 1286 matches - played in the top leagues of Spain, England, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Austria and the Czech Republic - were analyzed for results, fouls, bookings and reasons for bookings and contrasted between respective matchdays of season 2018/19 (regular attendance) and season 2019/20 (ghost games). There are two main findings. First, home teams were booked significantly more often with yellow cards for committing fouls in ghost games. Most importantly, this effect was independent of the course of the games. In contrast, bookings for other reasons (criticism and unfair sportsmanship) changed si