When football wins move people: sport, mobility and COVID-19 compliance around the world

Overview

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The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that the effectiveness of public-health rules depends not only on what governments require, but also on whether people change their everyday behaviour. Lockdowns, gathering limits and movement restrictions were intended to reduce contact and transmission, yet compliance varied widely between countries, regions and moments in time. One potentially important but underexplored source of behavioural pressure is sport. Football victories can create strong emotions, collective identity and incentives for fans to gather, celebrate and travel, even when public-health restrictions discourage these activities.

This project investigates whether football culture and positive match outcomes were associated with changes in mobility and compliance behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. It combines sports economics, public health, behavioural science, political economy, data science and causal inference. The broader study links football match outcomes and match importance to national and subnational mobility data, government stringency measures, COVID-19 conditions and indicators of football culture across a large international sample.

The central idea is to distinguish between de jure compliance requirements, such as government restrictions and policy stringency, and de facto compliance behaviour, such as actual movement to workplaces, retail areas, transport locations, homes, restaurants or public spaces. Important football wins, unexpected outcomes and rivalry matches may create temporary “pressure points” in which social celebration incentives compete with health rules.

A VRES student will contribute to a tightly scoped empirical component, such as constructing event-study windows around selected matches, analysing mobility changes in a subset of countries, comparing local versus national football effects, or producing descriptive profiles of football culture and pandemic compliance. The project offers a rare opportunity to work with large-scale international panel data and to study how culture, emotion and collective identity influence real-world behaviour during crises.

Research activities

The student will:

• Conduct a review existing literature to identify gaps and contextualize the current study;
• Work on real-world data using quantitative data analysis techniques;
• Document the findings of the study, interpreting the data and drawing conclusions based on the analysis.

The student will work with Dr Ho Fai Chan and members of the behavioural economics/AI research team at the ARC BITA Centre. They will gain practical experience in Python or R, reproducible data cleaning, regression modelling, visualisation, research documentation and academic writing.

Outcomes

• The project aims to produce a draft manuscript that includes the following:
  • Introduction: Overview of the study’s background and significance.
  • Literature Review: Review of the existing research literature and identification of gaps.
  • Research Aims/Objectives and Questions/Hypotheses: Clear articulation of the study’s aims/objectives and research questions/hypotheses.
  • Methodology: Description of the data collection process and analysis methods.
  • Results and Discussion: Presentation and interpretation of findings.
  • Conclusions and Future Work: Summary of key insights and recommendations for future research.
  • Reference List/Bibliography
  • Appendices (optional)
• Generate a brief, 2-3 slide presentation to present your research at the Faculty of Business and Law VRES Showcase to conclude the program.
• (Optional) The student will be eligible to present the findings of their research to an audience of 100+ academics and industry partners in the annual BITA conference in February/March 2027, provided the student is keen and interested to.

(Optional) The ultimate goal is to co-author and submit the manuscript with the student to an academic journal, provided the student is keen and interested to. However, it should be noted that the primary deliverable is a final draft manuscript. As it is not certain that the student will be paid beyond the completion of the VRES program in early 2025, any further work on the paper would be entirely voluntary and optional for the student.

Skills and experience

• Suitable for students in economics, data science, statistics, public health, sport science/analytics, IT or related areas;
• Some proficiency in data entry, data analysis, and statistical techniques preferred; and
• Experience using software such as Stata, R and Python and/or an interest in sport analytics or mobility data would be beneficial for this role.

Scholarships

You may be eligible to apply for a research scholarship.

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Keywords

• Football
• Sport economics
• Mobility
• Compliance

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.