“...and the crowd goes wild!” – The impact of crowds and simulated crowd noise on performance in professional darts players during the COVID-19 pandemic

In 2020, sport events could no longer be held with spectators due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the effect of missing audiences has been studied numerously in team sports with diverse effects, studies on individual performances are rare. The current investigation analyzes individual performances of professional dart players over 4 years in (a) the absence of spectators, (b) the presence of noisy, real crowds, and (c) artificial crowd noise (simulated crowds) substituting live spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic.Darts is a coordination-based accuracy task requiring full attention. Empirical evidence suggests that performances in coordination-based accuracy tasks are negatively impacted by the presence of others. Therefore, following the results regarding the impact of sport spectators on motor tasks, we hypothesize that tournament performance of elite darts players deteriorates in the presence of a real audience (RA) in comparison to no audience (NA) and a simulated- audience (SA).Data from professional darts ranking tournaments from 2018 to 2021 was retrieved from dart- sorakel.com. The sample consisted of N=442 players (98.8% male) and N=26,724 individual performances.The influence of RA and SA on checkout percentage (CP) and three-dart average (3DA) was analyzed using separate multilevel models, controlling for player rank, round of the tournament, year, and CP (for 3DA). Competing with SA and RA resulted in decreased CP with an effect of b(stand_real)=-.20, p<.001, and b(stand_sim)=-.14, p<.001. 3DA increased with SA, b(stand_sim)= .08, p<.001, and decreased with a RA, b(stand_sim)= -.07, p<.001.Crowds appear to have a negative effect on the coordination-based task darts, yet effect sizes are negligible to small. We conclude that professional dart players do not enjoy an advantage when playing in front of a real audience.