Slowly the barriers to safe standing in English football are tumbling. Most supporters want it. The majority of top-flight clubs back it. And, as we learnt last week, Shrewsbury Town will soon become the first league side to introduce it. Yet while the advantages for fans – and club finances – are repeated ad nauseam, another potential benefit is rarely discussed. Might safe standing improve a home team’s performance, too?
The idea sounds left-field, even barmy. But anyone who has stood on the terraces knows the strange alchemy they possess and how the sound can spread like a contagion, inspiring players and intimidating referees. And with the Football Supporters’ Federation noting that safe-standing sections could legally fit 1.8 people into the same space as one seated fan, stadiums are likely to become buzzier again.
Could it make a difference in a sport where home-field advantage has been eroding for decades? Ignacio Palacios‑Huerta, a professor of management, economics and strategy at the London School of Economics and head of talent ID at Athletic Bilbao, where he also sits on the board, suggests so.
He points to multiple studies that show stadiums with a better attendance-to-capacity ratio can influence referees – and help the better supported team.
One way to illustrate this is by looking at the link between referee bias and crowd size with injury time. On average it is three minutes in football’s top tiers. However, if the home team is behind by just a single goal, injury time stretches to 35% longer than average, whereas if they are ahead by one goal, it is 29% less.
“What we also find is that when crowds are larger, referees become more biased,” he says. “An increase of one standard deviation in crowd size causes the home bias to rise by 20%.” Unsurprisingly, when the crowd is largely made up of away fans, home bias is mitigated.
Palacios-Huerta also cites another study, which looked at what happens when teams in Italy were forced to play in empty stadiums. It found that without any spectators, the typical ‘home’ advantage in terms of foul rate and yellow and red cards disappeared entirely.
That should not come as a surprise. Referees might think they are immune from crowd pressure but the data suggests otherwise. When 40 qualified referees were asked to judge 47 incidents from a 1998-99 match between Liverpool and Leicester – half with crowd noise, half in silence – researchers found that those viewing the footage with crowd noise awarded 15.5% fewer fouls against the home team compared with those watching on mute.
Other research has shown that when teams in Germany removed running tracks from their stadium they also received fewer yellow and red cards at home. As the co-author Dr Rob Simmons, an economist at Lancaster University, explains: “Less distance between fans and referee imposes more social pressure on referees. A switch to safe standing would be predicted to have similar consequences.”
Palacios-Huerta, meanwhile, gives another example from his experiences at Bilbao about how crowds can also affect players. A few years ago the club moved to a new stadium and had to play for one season with no fans behind one end. Beforehand the coach Ernesto Valverde asked him to research the effects of playing in such an asymmetric venue. When he examined Rayo Vallecano, whose stadium is U-shaped, he found there were between 2-3% more goals (both by the home and visiting teams) in the end without supporters.
That result is counter-intuitive – perhaps the defence is more relaxed or attackers feel less pressured? – but notable. As Palacios-Huerta explains: “When I discussed the implications with Valverde for whether to choose to attack the end with no people in the first or second half, one assistant mentioned the effects were very small. I replied they were potentially huge in terms of points and money.
“I showed this by translating the impact on goals to expected points if we managed to attack during the whole season the first half towards the end with no people. It was between 1.5 and two points in a season – so potentially choosing ’correctly’ the ends by halves was worth a lot.”
Of course these effects are subtle. Millwall are not going to win the Premier League by building a 200,000 safe-standing stadium. We are talking a point here, a fortuitous decision there. But it all helps. In the season Bilbao played in their three-sided stadium, incidentally, they qualified for the Champions League.
That said, there is no knowing yet the true desire for safe standing. The former Coventry City managing director Chris Anderson – a supporter – wonders whether it might be a symbolic demand that harks back to the ‘good old days’ for a generation of fans old enough to remember standing. “What if you built it and no one came?” he asks, especially given the cost of reconfiguring stadiums.
It is a reasonable point. Undoubtedly safe standing is linked to a yearning for something ‘lost’ from English football beyond the ability to stand. Yet if the demand is there and it leads to cheaper prices and a better atmosphere, while also ensuring that no fan who attends a match ever loses his or her life, it is hard not to back it – especially if boosting one’s team is a happy by-product.