The Size of the Crowd and Home Advantage in Football: Evidence from Chinese Super League

Abstract

Home advantage is a well-established phenomenon in professional football. However, the literature on the effect of the size of the crowd on home advantage has produced mixed results. The present study utilized data from all the games in the Chinese Super League between the 2011 and 2019 seasons. Using multivariate regression, where we control for teams’ abilities, different schedule related variables and referees’ unobserved characteristics, we find that the size of attendance has a positive effect on home advantage in terms of yellow cards, scored goals and points per game. Our finding emphasizes the important role of crowd on home advantage, not only for the dichotomous comparison between games with and without crowd, but also for the continuous case with varying levels of crowd.

Keywords: Home advantage, referee bias, Chinese Super League, attendance.

JEL Classification: D00, J71, L00, Z13, Z20