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Audiences exert significant influence on the behaviors of those being watched, as evident in professional soccer matches where crowd reactions can reach up to 120 dB. The presence of a home audience is linked to the home team advantage effect, enhancing motivation and potentially biasing referee decisions. While research confirms the positive impact of home audiences on team performance, their effect on individual players remains unclear, with some instances suggesting performance degradation, particularly in high-pressure situations like penalty kicks. Factors such as social facilitation and increased anxiety due to audience expectations may contribute to this phenomenon. However, recent studies during the COVID-19 pandemic indicate contradictory findings, suggesting that the absence of a home audience might improve penalty kick performance for the home team. To investigate this further, our study compared penalty kick performance in matches with and without audiences, hypothesizing that the absence of audiences would lead to better outcomes for home teams due to reduced anxiety and expectancy among players.
The study analyzed penalty kicks from major European leagues during the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 seasons, with one season featuring audience presence and the other without due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data sourced from Transfermarkt included 873 penalties with audience and 950 without. The analysis categorized outcomes (goal, no-goal), and types of no-goals (save, miss), examining the impact of audience and team. Likelihood ratio tests assessed model fit.
The study analyzed how soccer penalty kick performance of home and away teams was affected by audience presence, comparing kicks with crowds in 2018–2019 to those without spectators in 2020–2021 due to COVID-19. Contrary to expectations based on previous research, there wasn’t a significant home team disadvantage observed, but home teams did miss fewer penalties without an audience. However, this didn’t translate into improved penalty outcomes. Interestingly, away teams experienced significantly worse penalty kick outcomes in empty stadiums.
The decline in missed penalties for the home team without spectators supports the choking under pressure theory. This theory suggests increased anxiety leads to inward attention shift, disrupting movement automaticity and causing inaccurate outcomes. However, choking under pressure in penalty kicks can result from various factors, including centralized shots, but the absence of spectators didn’t significantly affect shot placement.
Our findings on penalty misses contradict Ferraresi and Gucciardi’s (2021) social facilitation theory from their study on ghost games during 2019–2020, likely due to their smaller dataset (148 kicks vs. our 950 kicks) and our inclusion of observations from smaller competitions with smaller crowds. Ferraresi and Gucciardi proposed that social facilitation effects were only evident in front of large crowds (i.e., 75,000).
Our prediction that home teams would benefit from increased penalty kick success in the absence of audiences was not supported. Contrary effects were observed, with away team goalkeepers showing a numerical increase in saves from 12.8% to 15.8% when no audience was present. This rise in saves may partially counterbalance the decrease in missed penalties by home team players. While it’s speculated that the increased save rate could be due to more centralized kicks by home players, there’s no evidence suggesting a change in their target areas. Alternative explanations, such as goalkeepers’ improved timing without auditory cues, warrant consideration.
our study shows that away teams experienced significantly worse penalty kick outcomes without audiences compared to when audiences were present, a finding that challenges existing literature. This discrepancy may stem from the absence of audience-induced pressure motivating away players, or potentially improved performance by home team goalkeepers in the absence of distractions. Despite this, no significant effects were observed in terms of the number of misses or the area the ball entered the goal, suggesting other factors may contribute to penalty outcomes.
In conclusion, our study confirms that home audiences negatively impact individual players’ performance, especially in high-pressure scenarios like penalty kicks. While home team penalty takers tend to miss more penalties with audiences present, referees exhibit bias in favor of the home team, though this bias diminishes without audiences. Interestingly, away teams benefit from audience presence, suggesting the importance of pressure training for penalty kicks and further research on the interactive dynamics between players and audiences.
Source:
Ran Zheng, John van der Kamp, Kjeld Kemperman, Iris de Jong & Simone Caso (2023) An investigation into the effect of audiences on the soccer penalty kick, Science and Medicine in Football, DOI: 10.1080/24733938.2023.2285963