If current events continue as presently trajected we are likely to see a slew of professional (and D1 college) athletic games played in “empty” stadiums for some unknown period of time. For gamblers (and fans), one immediate question is how playing in an empty stadium may impact the outcome. One piece of emerging conventional wisdom–fueled by little more than intuition–is that the putative “home field advantage” attributable to (assumed) systematic referee “bias” favoring home teams may vanish in empty stadiums.
It turns out that the “empty” stadium “experiment” has happened before–in Italian professional soccer flowing from a tragic soccer “hooligan” incident in 2007. Consequently, some data–albeit limited–exist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two economists, Per Pettersson-Lidbom (Stockholm Univ.) and Mikael Priks’ (CESifo, Germany), exploited these data, construed the temporary “empty stadium” policy as an exogenous shock to the number of spectators, and leveraged it to test the “referees may be biased due to social pressure” hypothesis.
