The Impact of the Fans on Premier League Teams

How important is their fanbase? The data speaks for itself.

John Bica
Towards Data Science
6 min readMay 31, 2021

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Photo by Braden Hopkins on Unsplash

Like many sports leagues, the last two seasons of the English Premier League have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic leading to matches being played behind closed doors. In other words, no fans were allowed to attend many matches. This inspired me to analyze the data and try to understand what impact the fans had on the home teams overall since fan presence is often attributed to providing the home team with a home-field advantage.

From the millions of Liverpool supporters chanting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at Anfield Stadium which sends chills down your spine to the countless local Newcastle United fans who are among the most passionate and intense, many would argue the presence of fans is felt in one way or another.

Previously, I produced a holistic analysis of the data and statistics between matches with fans vs matches with no fans.

However, for this article, I want to drill down further into the specific teams and understand how influential fans were to their success. To do this, we’ll compare match results and statistics for each team between those matches played with fans and those without fans between the 2019–2021 seasons.

Teams Included

All teams from both seasons are included with the exception of those teams that were either relegated or promoted at the end of the 2019–2020 season. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have data from both groups of matches for those teams in the league.

The data collected were all matches the start of the 2019 season until March 15, 2021. These matches were split into two groups: one with fans present and one without. For more details on the data collection process, feel free to refer to the previous post.

Areas of Exploration

There are a few areas I’d like to explore based on some assumptions or general beliefs of how home…

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