Quantification of Home Advantage in the English Premier League and Under the Effect of COVID.
This project explores a well-known but often debated phenomenon in sports analytics: the home advantage. More specifically, it aims to quantify the extent of this advantage in the context of the English Premier League (EPL) of football, and examine how it was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced matches to be played behind closed doors, without fans in the stadium.
Using detailed match data from multiple seasons of the EPL, I applied a variety of statistical techniques to analyze match outcomes, goal differentials, and other performance metrics, comparing home and away results both before and during the pandemic.
A central hypothesis of the project is that the absence of crowd support during the COVID-19 lockdowns materially altered the dynamics of football games, particularly by reducing the psychological and strategic benefits associated with playing at home.
One of the key findings of the project is a drop in home advantage during the COVID-affected matches. This result supports the hypothesis that fans play a non-trivial role in influencing player performance and referee behavior.
Overall, this work provides a robust empirical framework for quantifying home advantage and illustrates how real-world disruptions, such as a global pandemic, can offer natural experiments for testing long-standing theories in sports science and behavioral economics.