Football, like all elite sports, is about fine margins: points, percentages, fractions, decimals, millimetres, inches, offside armpits and onside toes.
They can mean the difference between not only winning, losing or drawing, but lifting trophies, landing titles, determining Champions League places, relegation or survival.
Take last season, when Aston Villa secured a point against Sheffield United due to a technological error not awarding a goal that clearly crossed the line, which kept them up on the final day at Bournemouth’s expense.
How much of an impact, then, will the government’s coronavirus tier system and the subsequent allowance of small numbers of supporters into stadiums have on Premier League outcomes? More than you might realise.
“It would be bonkers to think that there wasn’t something going on,” Dr James Reade, head of economics at Reading University, tells i. “If you are doing something and there’s a crowd watching, subconsciously or consciously you’re going to behave differently to if there’s no crowd watching.”
People who run marathons speak of the boost given by spectators lining the streets and cheering them on. Naturally, the same applies to footballers.
There is a small sample evidencing the advantage gained by teams with even 2,000 supporters in the stands from recent weeks, but research conducted by Dr Reade and a team of academics into the impact of fans in stadiums, using numbers and data to analyse the pandemic affect, spans 17 countries and 6,000 matches. Twenty five per cent were played behind closed doors, roughly another 20 per cent featured smaller numbers of fans.
Fascinatingly, they discovered that matches without crowds reduced the chance of the home team winning by three per cent, but that the figure is virtually wiped out even if only a small number attended.
“We can find the likelihood of winning a home match given the number of fans in a stadium,” he says. “The more fans, the more likely the home team wins, the more likely the away team gets yellow cards, and so on.
“When you add in having no fans, it’s completely different. It’s a real outlier having no fans. What we’ve seen is even a small number of fans – a few hundred, a thousand – it brings you closer to having all fans back.
“A crude way of looking at it is that three per cent fewer home wins is gone, you’re back at zero. There should be a small boost to the home team on average.”
A small boost, but could it be the difference between relegation and survival? Fourth and fifth? Premier League and Champions League riches, or potentially years back in the lower divisions. The cost is unquantifiable, but vast.
When the country was taken out of the second lockdown, Arsenal were the first top-tier team in England since March to host fans, in a Europa League tie with Rapid Vienna, on 3 December. At the time, 10 of 20 Premier League clubs were in Tier 2 and could invite 2,000 supporters back. Twenty days later, only four remain: Liverpool and Everton in Merseyside, and Brighton and Southampton. By Boxing Day, it will be only two, with the two south-coast clubs entering Tier 4, it was announced on Wednesday.
Twenty days of a skewed advantage that could be costly for some come the end of the season. Managers are starting to realise, their collective voice growing in concern: Leeds manager Marco Bielsa, Jose Mourinho at Tottenham, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer of Manchester United, Everton’s Carlo Ancelotti.
“The team that has home fans has a different intensity, has a different temperature, a different atmosphere and that is of course an advantage,” Mourinho said.
Ancelotti has benefited from it, admitting fans made the difference at Goodison Park in tight wins against Arsenal and Chelsea.
“The players are more focused, more concentrated and more motivated because the supporters have helped us a lot,” he said. “You can hear them, it seems like there are more than 2,000.
“We have been used to having no noise in the stadium. For a long time we were without crowds and it’s a totally different environment.”
There are further examples.
Liverpool, in Tier 2, scored a last-minute Roberto Firmino winner against Spurs in a top-of-the-table encounter to move ahead of Mourinho’s side for the first time in weeks, in front of 2,000 fans inside Anfield.
Tier 2 Brighton scored a late equaliser at home to Sheffield United. When London was in Tier 2, Fulham were transformed in the first half of their first match when 2,000 socially distanced supporters cheered them on from either end of Craven Cottage, earning them a point against Liverpool that could’ve been three.
Dr Reade points out that the home crowd that afternoon in west London, delighted merely at the chance to attend live football, was likely very different to one that would’ve turned up had they been there all season and grown weary of repeatedly losing, expecting the worst against the reigning Premier League champions.
Crystal Palace also took a point off Spurs at Selhurst Park when London was in Tier 2, then six days later, when London moved into Tier 3 and fans were banned, they lost 0-7 to Liverpool.
Manchester United have long maintained they can safely accommodate 23,500 supporters at Old Trafford. But when the decision was made to keep Manchester in Tier 3 a week ago it meant that the stadium will remain empty, a body without its lungs, for a ninth successive month. Meanwhile, 35 miles down the M62, Liverpool and Everton have maintained that home edge.
And United’s home form has been woeful. Before the recent victory against Leeds United, in six games they had one once, scored only three times and conceded 10. After failing to win their first four home games for the first time since 1972, Solskjaer insisted that “home and away form is out the window with no fans in the stadium. You can’t look at that. It doesn’t really mean too much”.
It means much more, however, when some clubs are allowed supporters back while others cannot.
“It’s got a lot of validity that it creates changes, it creates differences, as much as you like to think it’s unavoidable because it’s what the government put in place, it’s hard not to think there’s not going to be some kind of affect of that and it means there isn’t the same kind of level playing field that there perhaps was,” Dr Reade concludes.
While the margins might be small now – a point here, three there – the impact at the end of the season will be enormous.
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from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3aGcOHF
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