Covid-19 has had an obvious impact on professional sport, and football in particular - with competitions and events being postponed, cancelled, or taking place without fans in tightly controlled scenarios to avoid the spread of the virus. The extensive measurement of sport, alongside the abundance of Covid-19 related data on cases and mortality affords potentially greater insights into how a virus like Covid-19 can impact outcomes. In this work we look at how the spread of the virus throughout 2020 and 2021 has impacted football outcomes using a highly detailed dataset on events within football matches all around Europe, and using information on the spread of Covid-19 in the local areas that football clubs are located in, and in the football clubs themselves.
The event timings are 18:15 for 18:30 start, ending at 19:30. 18:15 for 18:30 means there is an initial period of 15 minutes to enable participants to make any necessary technical adjustment before a prompt event start at 18:30. The scheduled end time is 19:30.
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James Read, Head of Department and Professor of Economics at the University of Reading,
James has been on the faculty since 2013. Before that he was a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham after completing a DPhil and Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford. His DPhil was in macro-econometrics and forecasting, focusing on the applied aspects of the discipline. Over the years since his research interests have moved towards sport, not just because it is an ever important part of the economy, but also because it generates a lot of data, and allows more precise conclusions to be drawn than ever can be across the entire macroeconomy.
He has looked at the efficiency of markets, labour market discrimination, various aspects of sport forecasting, and over the last year has investigated various aspects of the interaction between sport and Covid-19, considering how it has affected demand for mass attendance events, and how those events have affected the subsequent spread of the virus.