Home advantage in football varies over time. Existing theories of home advantage struggle to explain this time-series variation. We argue that the decline in home advan- tage in English football since the mid-1980s was partly caused by the advent of tele- vised football. We argue that the increase in live television coverage of football matches has worked to incentivize players to not to shirk when playing in away games, as sup- porters can now more effectively monitor their efforts. We test this hypothesis using both time-series and panel-data econometrics.
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