Premier League football is now only two days away from returning to our screens for the first time in more than three months, with Aston Villa and Sheffield United the first teams to scratch the itch for top-flight action in England.
It will not quite be business as usual, though; the coronavirus pandemic has ensured that it will take a long time for things to return to how they were before and there will be a number of differences when the Premier League does resume.
Teams are now allowed to use five subs per match, social distancing is recommended when celebrating and, most importantly, there will not be any fans in the stadium to witness the matches.
The fact that all 92 remaining Premier League games are being broadcast on TV will help supporters to get their football fix, but the lack of a matchday crowd inside the stadium will have far-reaching implications both on and off the field.
It would not be a surprise to see the players' work rate drop slightly without the buzz of a live crowd to cheer them on, and the boost the supporters give players is unquantifiable to a certain extent.
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What can be measured is an intriguing pattern which has emerged in the Bundesliga since its return, with away teams experiencing much more joy without the home crowd against them in stadiums.
This naturally raises the question of whether the same will be true in the Premier League.
Time will ultimately tell on that front, but the Bundesliga statistics paint a telling picture and provide the closest usable template for what we might be able to expect in the Premier League.
Since the Bundesliga returned on May 16 home teams have incredibly won only 11 of the 55 matches - a ratio of just 20%.
To put that into context, the lowest-ever win percentage for home teams across an entire Bundesliga campaign is 40.2% - in 1990-91 and 1995-96 - while before lockdown home teams won 43.7% of matches in 2019-20.
The number of home victories has therefore more than halved - a huge drop which provides convincing evidence that the behind-closed-doors nature of football now has had a massive impact on results.
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Also notable is the rise in away victories, which further supports that conclusion and shows that away teams are not merely nicking draws now.
Indeed, with 28 away victories from the 55 Bundesliga games since the restart, visiting teams have won more than half of the matches.
That tally of 50.9% is not only a vast increase on the pre-lockdown figure of 34.5% of Bundesliga games which ended in away wins, but is also comfortably in excess of the pre-lockdown average for home wins too.
For struggling clubs that could be good or bad news; often the crowd plays a huge role in pulling off any upsets over bigger teams at home and they will not have that advantage anymore, but they may also be more hopeful of picking up an unexpected result in away games themselves.
Liverpool, meanwhile, have won every single home Premier League game they have played this season, but will no longer have the fervent Anfield crowd roaring them on.
There will be a lot of new normals for clubs to adapt to in the coming weeks and the prospect of significantly more away wins could be the most important and decisive of the lot.
Barney Corkhill
