Big Crowds Change Coaching Decisions — But Not for the Better, Bucknell Research Finds

As the United States hosts the 2026 FIFA World Cup from June 11 to July 19, coaches preparing to face Team USA may find themselves confronting a familiar temptation: protect against the energy of a large home crowd by becoming more defensive.

Research by Bucknell University Professor Chris Magee, economics  — a lifelong soccer player and fan — suggests that instinct may be exactly the wrong response.

Across two recent studies of professional soccer, Magee found that visiting managers tend to make more defensive substitutions when playing in front of large crowds. Yet his research also shows that teams are almost always better off keeping more attacking players on the field.

The findings suggest that one of soccer's most common late-game strategies — replacing a forward with a defender to preserve a lead, similar to American football's "prevent defense" (with additional defensive backs) — may actually prevent winning.

"In nearly every situation, the manager is better off playing attacking players rather than having a lot of defenders," Magee says. "Bringing extra defenders on at the end of the game to preserve a lead is almost always a bad idea."

The conclusion is particularly relevant as packed stadiums are expected to create a home-field advantage for Team USA, Canada and Mexico throughout the tournament. Other nations whose fans travel in great numbers to the World Cup, such as Argentina and Brazil, may also have a de facto home-field advantage as well.

In a 2025 study published in the Journal of Sports Economics, Magee examined substitution decisions made by managers in the top five European football leagues between 2017 and 2021. The study found that while crowd size had little effect on substitutions made by home teams, managers of visiting teams became noticeably more defensive when facing larger crowds.

The pattern appeared both when comparing matches played before the pandemic with those played in empty stadiums during COVID-19 restrictions and when comparing games with larger crowds to those with smaller crowds. Managers often responded to large hostile crowds by removing attacking players and adding defenders.

"I attribute that behavior to the negative social pressure that crowds put on the away team. There is literature showing that social pressure induces fear and that fear causes people to make more risk-averse decisions," Magee says

"Managers tended to be more conservative if they were in away stadiums," he adds. "You see that in pro football, where you choose more conservative plays if you're away."

But a second study, published in 2025 in the Journal of Human Sport and Exercise, suggests those conservative decisions are frequently self-defeating.

Analyzing how goal scoring and goal conceding change with the number of attacking players on the field, Magee tested the common assumption that adding attackers creates offense at the expense of defense. Instead, he found that teams generally score more goals and, surprisingly, concede fewer goals when they have more attacking players on the field. The benefit of having more attacking players is especially large for teams favored to win the match.

The research also found that managers routinely deploy more defenders when their teams are underdogs, even though the strategy rarely improves outcomes.

"It's self-defeating to do that in almost every case," Magee says. "The only case where there may be a tiny advantage to having more defensive players is when a team is a heavy underdog playing an away game. For home teams or when the game is between two evenly matched teams, it's better to set up with a more attacking formation."

Those findings dovetail with earlier research Magee conducted with his wife and fellow Bucknell economics professor Amy Wolaver. That study found that larger crowds increase the rate at which goals, yellow cards and penalty kicks occur late in matches.

Using pandemic-era matches played without fans as a natural experiment, the researchers found that crowd pressure appears to create a growing sense of urgency as games approach their final minutes.

Taken together, the studies suggest that World Cup opponents facing Team USA in front of packed American crowds may be inclined to retreat into a defensive shell. Magee's research indicates that doing so could make them less, not more, likely to succeed.