The science of home-field advantage

1:40:58field advantage >> which is a well doumented phenomenon right like there is a home field advantage for like the players they get riled up there's a home field advantage for refereeing there is a referee bias that contributes to homefield advantage in the English Premier League and it has to do with just like psychology right like the referee doesn't want to give a bad um a bad decision to the thousands and tens of thousands of people that are watching him. >> Now, it didn't quite work with the Balagan >> right situation >> situation, but it did work when Argentina was in Miami >> where Messi plays in the MLS in Miami,

1:41:38>> which is home field effectively. >> Exactly. And like even the Kansas City game, right, against Switzerland, packed with Argentinian fans, >> every single one of these Argentina games just has so many fans, right? And so what these guys did was, you know, it it's hard to disentangle um the the performance of the team with the performance of the referees. But what they did was separate out referees and look at individual referees whether they were judging a home game versus another another game and look at individual referees. So now you've washed out the effect of whether the team is at home or not. Okay. And in the next figure, we'll show you this is a figure from the from from the um

1:42:21from from the paper on the x-axis all the individual referees and this is the mean goal differential that they could have contributed to based on their yellow cards and and all and all things like that. All of it is positive. Meaning like the referee bias is always positive for the home team. >> That's very even then. Okay. >> You could be like, it's really hard to conflate the home field advantage from the referee and the home field advantage from the team. Like the team is more inspired. Maybe they're more violent. >> The 12th man, the fan, like all these things, it's they they play there every whatever. >> Exactly. So, what we really need to do as a control would be to remove the 12th man.

1:43:01>> Right. Right. And lo and behold, the COVID pandemic happens.