A hivatkozott tanulmány:

Favoritism under Multiple Sources of Social Pressure

Gábor Békés, Endre Borza, and Marton Fleck

De Correspondent is a Dutch, members-funded, ad-free journalistic platform, which tends to write not about the news but the underlying structures of the news. ‘We don’t write about the weather, we write about climate’, as its founder likes to say. De Correspondent’s journalist met up with two of the paper‘s authors at a football labour economics workshop in Rotterdam; the story about the research on referees and favoritism was featured on the platform’s home page.

New research by economists Békés, Borza and Fleck shows that the home team bias of referees in football still exists even when no spectators are present. Football referees have always tended to give more stoppage time to home teams, and the classic explanation for this was the pressure spectators put on the referee. However, during the ‘ghost games’ of the Covid-19 pandemic, this extra extra time for the home team remained intact. Apparently it wasn’t just the spectators who influenced the referees’ decisions about stoppage time.

Closer inspection of the data suggests that the causal mechanism – at any rate during the ghost games of corona in 2020 – may lie in the clubs’ prestige. Influential teams — measured in success on the pitch or wealth — teams clubs received more overtime from referees than less successful clubs. Might this mean that people shouldn’t bother screaming at the referee, as the referee appears to be somewhat more immune to what they scream at him?

Perhaps – and perhaps wise clubs should also treat the referee nicely, Dutch magazine De Correspondent writes based on the paper of BBF. However, perhaps, their star allure will be just enough.