I’ve long had my eye out for intriguing papers that cover my two favorite areas of research, causal inference and sports statistics. For unfamiliar readers, causal inference tools allow for the estimation of causal effects (i.e., does smoking cause cancer) in non-experimental settings. Given that almost all sports data is inherently observational, there would seem to be opportunities for applied causal papers to answer questions in sports (here’s one).

It was with this vigor in mind that I read a paper, the Midweek Effect on Performance: evidence from the Bundesliga, recently posted and linked here. The authors, Alex Krumer & Michael Lechner – the latter of which has done substantial causal inference work – use propensity score matching to estimate the effect of midweek matches on home scoring.

The authors conclude that:

Playing midweek leads to an effect of about half a point in total, resulting from the home…