Seasonal Home Advantage in English Professional Football; 1973-2018

Peeters, Thomas; Ours, Jan C. van

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3603228

Cited by 16 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…It is notable that the HA before lock-down in 2019/20 was less than in the season before, and also less than reported in literature (e.g., Pollard and Gómez, 2014a with 58.35% for 2006–2012), but not significantly different. This is in accordance with a reported general decline in HA (Pollard, 2008 ; Peeters and van Ours, 2020 ).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Home advantage (HA), quantified by the number of points won at home expressed as a percentage of all points at home and away (Pollard, 1986 ; Pollard and Gómez, 2014b , 2015 ), is a well-studied phenomenon in soccer. Despite a decline in the last decades, probably due to increased professionalism, distancing of players from fans, and globalized marketing strategies that decreased the identification of the local community with clubs (Smith, 2003 ; Pollard, 2006a ), HA is still present in professional soccer (Peeters and van Ours, 2020 ). A crucial assumption for calculating the HA is a balanced schedule, meaning that all teams play two games against each other, one at home and one away (Pollard and Gómez, 2014b ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Covid-19 Has Turned Home Advantage Into Home Disadvantage in the German Soccer Bundesliga

Tilp

Thaller

2020

Front. Sports Act. Living

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The main factors for home advantage (HA), quantified by the number of points won at home expressed as a percentage of all points, are believed to be crowd support, territoriality, familiarity, and travel fatigue. In 2020, the German Soccer Bundesliga interrupted its championship due to the Covid-19 pandemic after 25 rounds and the last nine rounds were played without audience. This unique situation allowed studying the effect of spectators on the team's performance and the referee's decisions. We hypothesized a decrease in HA and a more balanced distribution of fouls and disciplinary cards in the games without audience (GWOA) compared to the games with audience (GWA). We evaluated n = 223 GWA and n = 83 GWOA of the season 2019/20 and all games of the preceding season 2018/19 to analyze the distribution of game outcomes (wins, losses, and draws) and HA. We analyzed the number of fouls, disciplinary cards, and penalty kicks. We found significant differences in HA between GWA (HA = 54.35%) and GWOA (HA = 44.1%) as well as GWOA and games of 2018/19 (HA = 57.63%). The distribution of game outcomes in GWOA did not differ from GWA but differed significantly from 2018/19 (p = 0.031). The distribution of fouls showed a significant difference to equal distribution in GWA [home: 2,595 (48.56%); away: 2,749 (51.44%)] but not in GWOA [home: 1,067 (50.54%); away: 1,044 (49.46%)]. In the GWOA, we counted 178 (51.1%, home) and 170 (48.9%, away) cards, representing a significant difference in the distribution to GWA [home: 405 (44.85%); away: 498 (55.15%)]. The number of red cards differed significantly from an equal distribution for GWA (14 home and 28 away) but not for GWOA (eight home and seven away). In the last nine rounds without audience, we observed more home losses (36) than home wins (27). Hence, the Covid-19 lock-down led to a home disadvantage. One reason for this surprising result could be that the home team is missing an important familiar aspect when playing in their empty stadium without social support from their home audience. Furthermore, both teams know about the HA thus the away team could be more motivated in this unusual situation.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Covid-19 Has Turned Home Advantage Into Home Disadvantage in the German Soccer Bundesliga

Tilp

Thaller

2020

Front. Sports Act. Living

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“…Bryson and colleagues 39 , demonstrated that the HA reduction is considerably larger when the previous seasons are included than when only the 2019/20 season is used for the analysis. This is in line with the observed phenomenon of decreasing HA over time 68 and was possibly a reason for the high estimates in some of the studies 48,51 .…”

Section: Comparison With Other Studies and Partial Attendancesupporting

confidence: 87%

The (Missing) 12th Man: Home Advantage Mediated (HAM) by Referee Bias and Team Performance During Covid

Bilalić¹,

Gula²,

Vaci³

2021

Preprint

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The fans’ importance in sports is acknowledged by the term ‘the 12th man’, a figurative extra player for the home team. Sport teams are indeed more successful when they play in front of their fans than when they play away. The supposed mechanism behind this phenomenon, termed Home Advantage (HA), is that fans’ support spurs home players to better performance and biases referees, which in turn determines the outcome. The inference about the importance of fans’ support is, however, indirect as there is normally a 12th man of this kind, even if it is an opponent’s. The current pandemic, which forced sporting activities to take place behind closed doors, provides the necessary control condition. Here we employ a novel conceptual HA model on a sample of over 4,000 soccer matches from 12 European leagues, some played in front of spectators and some in empty stadia, to demonstrate that fans are indeed responsible for the HA. However, the absence of fans reduces the HA by a third, as the home team’s performance suffers and the officials’ bias disappears. The current pandemic reveals that the figurative 12th man is no mere fan hyperbole, but is in fact the most important player in the home team.

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“…Second, an objective understanding of how the home team’s strength (relative to the opposition and within league merit positions) and the difficulty of their fixture schedule in terms of the opposition they face may impact the effects observed for HA, is missing from the literature. This is important as the quality of opposition a team faces is indicative of their likelihood of winning ( Peeters & van Ours, 2020 ), and more skilled sides may well rely less on their crowds’ support than their less-skilled counterparts. Third, the impact of unmeasured confounds has also not been fully considered, and while a number do exist which we cannot control for in this study (e.g., COVID infections, country-level heterogeneity in response to the pandemic, differences in training schedules, etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues

McCarrick

Bilalić

Neave

et al. 2021

Psychology of Sport and Exercise

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The home advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in football whereby the home team wins more games and scores more goals than the away team. One explanation is that the home crowd spurs on home team performance and causes the referee to unconsciously favour the home team. The Covid-19 (COVID) pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess this explanation for HA, as European football leagues played part of the 2019/2020 season with crowds present and concluded with crowds absent. Using multi-level modelling we compared team performance and referee decisions pre-COVID (crowd present) and during-COVID (crowd absent) across 4844 games from 15 leagues in 11 countries. HA (goals scored and points gained) was significantly reduced during-COVID, which reflected the inferior performance of the home team. In games without fans, home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities and referee-bias was diluted when controlling for the attacking dominance of teams; such that the number of fouls and yellow cards ruled against away sides, while still significant, was reduced and no effects were observed for red cards. Implications for sporting practice and directions for future research are discussed.

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Seasonal Home Advantage in English Professional Football; 1973-2018

Cited by 16 publications

References 17 publications

Covid-19 Has Turned Home Advantage Into Home Disadvantage in the German Soccer Bundesliga

Covid-19 Has Turned Home Advantage Into Home Disadvantage in the German Soccer Bundesliga

The (Missing) 12th Man: Home Advantage Mediated (HAM) by Referee Bias and Team Performance During Covid

Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues

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