Social pressure in football matches: an event study of ‘Remote Matches’ in Japan

ABSTRACT

Sports matches during the COVID-19 pandemic have been held without spectators. Exploiting this unprecedented situation as a natural experiment, we examine the impacts of social pressure on the match outcomes in Japan’s professional football league. As a result of the difference-in-difference estimation, we find that the number of fouls awarded to home team significantly decreases by about 1.05 in the matches with spectators, supporting the referee bias due to social pressure by the home-team’s supporters. In addition, the results indicate that the absolute number of the home-team’s supporters is more dominant in the source of referee bias than their share in the stadium.

KEYWORDS:

• Social pressure
• football
• COVID-19
• natural experiment
• no spectators

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C90
• L83

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The matches held in Okinawa, located south of Japan, on 12 August 2019, and 29 were without spectators due to the infection situation in the area.

² It should be noted on the terminology of ‘absolute number’ of spectators because the actual number of the spectators is not contained in the estimation. Here, we represent ‘absolute number’ in the sense that the number of the spectators who can watch in the stadium is larger during the $\mathrm{L}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{i}{\mathrm{t}}^{\le 50\mathrm{\%}}$ period in comparison with the $\mathrm{L}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{i}{\mathrm{t}}^{\le 30\mathrm{\%}}$ period.

³ The treatment effect in this kind of the estimation is interpreted as referees’ bias without a particular discussion in the literature. A possible direction in the literature could be to identify the objects that social pressure is directed in detail.