And football continued without the fans in the stands …
As if nothing else, tournaments and classics were played and are played, champions are crowned and there are celebrations. The plague of covid-19 made the stadiums empty. The public and that magical power that was given to them remained reduced to prerecorded sounds and superimposed images with a simple television effect.
Neither the fans influenced the games, nor were they ‘the 12th player’ or the owners of the teams or …
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In this market economy, they are simply customers of an industry that urgently demands them to sell a product that is wrapped in the colorful cellophane of passion and unconditional love.
The most fans believed themselves to be the most important thing in the stadium because with their songs, flags and shouts they supposedly ‘dwarfed’ the rival and they gave that theoretical advantage factor known as hometown.
Photo of the 2020 league final.
In recent months it has been a career that the home team lost importance in the local league because there is no public in the games. I use the data I compile with rigor and dedication Orlando Ascencio, my fellow Sports sub-editor in this newspaper, so that with figures, with indicators, it can be measured if that “perception” is real. As an immediate reference, average figures of the two leagues played in 2019, both with fans in stadiums, were compared against the data of the matches played in 2020 during the public ban due to the pandemic.
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Thus, in 2019 the local teams won 43.85 percent of the victories, compared to the 44.5 percent obtained by themselves without people in the stands! Visiting victories also increased: from 23.2 percent to 25.2. There were fewer ties: 32.9 versus 30.6 percent. Narrow variations.
In 2019, the local teams won 43.85 percent of the victories, compared to the 44.5 percent obtained by themselves without people in the stands!
There are old studies in Europe and the United States that assure that this “local factor” is not imposed by knowledge of the field or the weather or by the presence of the fans. They assure that it lies in the fact that the referees, consciously or unconsciously, whistle easier and faster in favor of the local.
In the 2019 Leagues with the public, the locals received an average of 2.79 yellow cards per game and the visitors, 29.6; against 2.4 and 2.6 per game behind closed doors. The same proportion. There was a more significant increase in expulsions for the locals, which rose from 0.13 per game to 0.2, against the visitors who remained practically the same, as they were reduced just from 0.19 to 0.18 per game.
The percentage of penalties in favor of the visitors also rose, from 0.12 to 0.23 per game. In the premises it remained: 0.19 to 0.2 per game.
Could it be that the VAR is responsible for this increase? The hypothesis is not easy to verify, since there were only two games with VAR per date.
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Football without an audience in stadiums is not the same, because there is less color and party (also less violence!) And, fundamentally, because teams stop earning money from the box office, but in our League it is basically the same in terms of results and developments.
The idea that due to the relative and romantic absence of the public the venue no longer weighs is incorrect. La Liga, football, the game continued without the fans in the stadiums, as if nothing, celebrating champions and championships with cardboard fans and prerecorded shouts …
GABRIEL MELUK
Sports Editor
@MelukLeCuenta
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