De Economist https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-020-09372-z Seasonal Home Advantage in English Professional Football; 1974–2018 Thomas Peeters1,3 · Jan C. van Ours2,3,4,5 © The Author(s) 2020 Abstract We study seasonal home advantage in English professional football over the period 1974 to 2018. We distinguish between absolute home advantage, enjoyed equally by all teams in a division, and relative home advantage, which difers among teams in the division. We fnd that absolute home advantage is substantial, ranging from 0.59 to 0.64 in terms of points per game or 0.44 to 0.46 in terms of goal difer- ence. Likewise, clubs difer substantially in the relative home advantage they enjoy. Relative home advantage is positively related to within-team variation in attendance and the use of an artifcial pitch. Despite big cross-divisional diferences in attend- ance, absolute home advantage is about the same in all divisions. Finally, there is a substantial decline in absolute home advantage over time that materializes equally across divisions. Keywords Professional football · Home advantage · Attendance · Managers JEL Classifcation Z21 · L83 The authors thank Martin van Tuijl, Alex Krumer, Stijn Baert, one of the editors of the special issue and an anonymous referee for comments on an earlier version of this paper. * Thomas Peeters
[email protected] Jan C. van Ours
[email protected] 1 Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus Center for Applied Sports Economics (ECASE), Erasmus Research Institute for Management (ERIM), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2 Tinbergen Institute Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 3 Tinbergen Institute Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 4 Department of Economics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia 5 CEPR, London, UK Vol.:(0123456789)1 3 T.