When some European elite football leagues returned to action last year amidst the pandemic, athletes played largely without crowds. These so-called ghost games offered researchers a rare opportunity to get into the heads of referees. What they found was that football officials—no longer pressured by fans—penalized only the home team with more yellow cards after fouls, with the apparent knock-on effect of severely dampening home-field advantage. The research was published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.
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Source: Phys.org