How much does the public influence the result of a football match? For decades, the value of the “twelfth man in the field” was a dogma of football that can condition athletes both in a positive way by transmitting cheering and sense of belonging and negative passing anxiety and pressure. Then, with the pandemic started in 2020, the world stopped and the stadiums emptied. That circumstance never happened before was transformed into an experiment on field factor. Without the phrasturous, pressure and cheering, what remained of the advantage of playing at home? The data collected at that time provided surprising answers, not only confirming the impact of the fans on the performance of the players through choirs, applauses or whistles, but also revealing an incredible influence on the arbitration decisions, free from the stresses of the screaming crowd.
The “twelfth man”: the secret of the field factor in football
The field factor means the tendency to obtain better results when playing on your field (or, in the case of national teams, in your country). This variable is very important in football and represents the reason behind many decisions regarding the calendar of the championships, such as the choice of alternation between home and trip. Among the elements for which it is important to consider the field factor carefully there are, for example, the movements of the team (especially in competitions in which you travel between different time spindles) and, of course, the presence of a favorable or opposite public.
In this sense, Covid-19 represented an unrepeatable circumstance to better understand the direct effect of the presence of fans on the sporting result: before the pandemic, almost there were no analysis of matches played in empty stadiums. Thus, there has been a clear confirmation of the hypothesis that the home teams obtain, on average, more points than those away when the public is present. The most logical explanation for these results is to be traced back to the concept of social influence and the consequent changes in the behavior of individuals. According to Émile Durkheim and his theory of social cohesion, in fact, cohesion arises from the network of relationships between individuals who share common objectives (in the case of sport, victory). This implies that a truly solidarity community has the ability to encourage the individual to perform better.
There is therefore an evident positive correlation between the presence of the favorable public and the advantage of the relative team, proportionally to the size of the crowd itself. This effect is not, however, absolute and several (sometimes neglected) factors can affect it. Among these: the style of play, the level of the teams, the position in the standings, the difficulty of the games and the degree of experience of the athletes. The latter variable comes into play mainly in relation to the choices and execution of the technical gesture during the race.
Moreover, in competitive sports, environmental sounds can turn into distractions both in relation to high and low -difficult scenarios, interfering with the visual research speed. In other words, in the case of disturbing elements such as the noise from the stands, a player usually takes more time to identify, for example, a free companion to serve.
The persuasive power of the public: the arbitration bias
Even the arbitrage, inevitably, is affected by the presence and behavior of the home audience during a football match. It has been shown that in situations of home advantage, multiple minutes of recovery are assigned in favor of the home team and multiple yellow penalties and cards against the guest team.
When, with the advent of the pandemic, the main European football championships played behind closed doors, the race directors instead whistled more fouls against the hosts and, consequently, have assigned more yellow cards than the pre-covid19 period. The number of goals, contrary, seemed to remain unchanged.
This evidence can also be traced back to social reasons. Social psychology claims, in fact, that humans have the innate tendency to adapt to the opinion of the majority. In the case of football, the pressure exerted by the public can therefore play a significant role.
It is interesting to note that the degree of experience of the tender judge is not a sufficient guarantee factor with respect to the absence of this effect on his own decisions. In the presence of highly disturbing noises, the consequences are still present, often even in a consistent way. What has been said also offers multiple food for thought on the methods of using the VAR technology which would probably guarantee a fairer support if it was used far from the acoustic conditioning of the public or in noise -free environments.
