Search Content

Matching Items (2)

Home Advantage in Sports: The Value it Holds with COVID Restrictions

Description

Home advantage affects the game in almost all team sports across the world. Due to<br/>COVID and all of the precautions being taken to keep games played, more extensive research is able to be conducted about what factors truly go into creating a home advantage. Some common factors of home advantage include the crowd, facility familiarity, and travel. In the English Premier League, there are no fans allowed at any of the games; furthermore, in the NBA, a bubble was created at one neutral venue with no fans in attendance. Even with the NBA being at a neutral site, there was still a “home team” at every game. The sports betting industry struggled due to failing to shift betting lines in accordance with this decreased home advantage. With these leagues removing some of the factors that are frequently associated with home advantage, analysts are able to better see what the results would be of removing these variables. The purpose of this research is to determine if these adjustments made due to COVID had an impact on the home advantage in different leagues around the world, and if they did, to what extent. Individual game data from the past 10 seasons were used for analysis of both the NBA and the Premier League. The results show that there is a significant difference in win percentage between prior seasons and seasons behind closed doors. In addition to win percentage, many other game statistics see a significant shift as well. Overall, the significance of being the home team disappears in games following the COVID-19 break.

ContributorsOsborne, Ashley A (Author) / Sopha, Matthew (Thesis director) / McIntosh, Daniel (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / WPC Graduate Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05

English Premier League Under the Salary Cap

Description

Our thesis brought forth the question, how would the implementation of a salary cap into the English Premier League influence the entertainment level of the league as well as the financial aspects of the league. The English Premier League currently has no salary cap which allows teams with billionaire owners to heavily spend on star players and training facilities. This makes it extremely difficult for small market teams to be able to compete for silverware when put up against these high spending clubs. There is also a huge financial issue with a lot of clubs in the EPL because many of them are heavily in debt and rely constantly on loans from financial groups to support their high cash outflow. We hypothesized that this implementation of the cap would help teams become more financially stable as well as creating more parity in the league. To test these assumptions we issued a survey which asked various questions regarding what people preferred when watching a sporting league. We then ran a simulation on the video game FIFA 19 with our own created salary cap which we developed to see if the implementation of the cap would create more parity in the league. To test the validity of the simulation on the video game, we ran simulations on last years FIFA 18 and compared it with the actual standings of the league season from that year. According to our simulation, the EPL would be a much more competitive league with more exciting games and more chance for the smaller market teams to compete for the lucrative positions in the league table. We also compared the financial successes of the NBA versus the EPL to see if the cap has been beneficiary to the NBA since its’ adoption in the early 80’s. We concluded that the implementation of the salary cap would make the league more exciting as well as having the ability to make the clubs more financially stable.

ContributorsMcwatt, Aaron (Co-author) / Soldan, Dario (Co-author) / Goegan, Brian (Thesis director) / Eaton, John (Committee member) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2019-05