Football With No Fans is Bad for Home Teams: But not how you Expect
By: Abhijith Mundanad Narayanan
Tags: Premier League, Data Science, Soccer, Analytics

The narrative of home support in football is in its power to push their teams to score more goals and hence lead to victories. But what does the data from the experiment of football with no fans show us?

Project Restart of the English Premier League led to the 2019–20 season resuming on Thursday 17th June 2020. The relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions in England from the 2nd of December meant that a handful of venues started allowing fans. However, the return of the new covid-19 strain and the increased restrictions across England means that we are set to see no fans at almost all but 2 stadiums for quite a while. This would be the right time to have a look at how the absence of home fans affected home performances of Premier League clubs since the restart of the 2019–20 season.

There were 192 matches, across two seasons, between these two days of 17th of June and 2nd of December. Therefore, I selected an equal number of matches that took place before the 2019–20 season was stopped due to the pandemic. I will call the first set, Football With No Fans (FWNF) and the second set, Football With Fans (FWF). Let us first compare the distributions in match results, i.e. in terms of home wins, draws or losses, between these two groups of matches.

Immediately, you can notice how the away wins have gone up considerably during FWNF. This is understandable, considering the intuition that the home advantage is limited without fans. Let us also look at the goals scored.

Naturally, the away goals are higher during FWNF than FWF. However, for an increase of 12 away wins, the away goals went up by 34. That is almost 3 goals a game. Partly, this increase could be down to the mad first few weeks, when teams were adjusting to the new scenario and football was madcap affairs. Still, I feel this is too large an increase across 192 matches. Moreover, though there was a decrease in home wins during FWNF compared to FWF, the total number of home goals remained almost the same.

Though there was a decrease in home wins during FWNF compared to FWF, the total number of home goals remained almost the same.

The jubilant fans witnessing wins through last-minute goals are the mainstays in highlight reels of any football season. During FWNF, did fans in fact miss such moments? Have a look at the goals scored after 80 mins in the matches during FWNF and FWF.

Well.. well.. well! The increase in away goals after 80 mins is remarkable for FWNF. Though, you see no drop at all in home goals after 80! Does it mean that the legend of home fans pulling the ball towards their opponent’s goal is a myth? The absence of home fans seem to help the away teams score more towards the end of matches rather than reduce the goals home teams score during the same period.

I have to add the caveat that 192 matches are not a large sample to draw such conclusion. However, since the comparison was between equal number of matches, I don’t believe it to be unfair. Now, with the return of stricter restrictions, FWNF is here to stay. And that is not great for home teams.