To what extent does "Home Advantage" really exist?

[Rob W]

I seem to remember the statos the Times uses looked at this last season

 

I think they said there was a home advantage - a small part seemed to be due to the ref but the main point was the away club playing defensively - fewer shots on goal, less possession, defensive set-up to start with = its in the mind

[Rob W]

A new paper for the Journal of Economic Psychology by friends of the Fink Tank, Katie Page, a University of London psychology lecturer, and Lionel Page, of the University of Westminster - the authors have been studying whether home advantage is influenced by refereeing decisions. And to do that they studied a truly impressive data set.

 

They analysed 37,830 matches from 1994 to 2007, covering a large number of world competitions. In all they looked at 872 referees in 58 competitions. Not bad.

 

To investigate the impact of referees, the Pages built a model to predict goal difference. They included in it all the things you might expect to influence home advantage. So, for instance, the model takes note of different competitions, in case this makes the advantage vary, and the quality of the teams, too.  If a referee always officiated at big games and the home advantage in those matches was different from the average, you would want to be sure that you ascribed the variation to the right thing — the big game, say, rather than the referee.

 

Once the model was built, the authors wanted to see if their prediction of the size of home advantage was improved by including in it information about who the referee was. If referee bias was non-existent, it would be pointless accounting for who the referee was in the model.

 

So what was the result? It mattered who the referee was. In fact, it mattered a lot.

 

On average, the home advantage is a goal difference of 0.36 in favour of the home team. The results of this paper suggest that it can be as low as 0.05 and as high as 0.75, depending on the referee. The Fink Tank’s Dr Mark Latham sent me a summary of this result with three exclamation marks after it and the comment: “This is really a big deal.”

 

So, using their big data set, the Pages have made a real breakthrough. They have proven that referee bias is a significant component of home advantage. But there is more. This is a paper published in a psychology journal, after all, and the authors have a psychological theory about referee bias. They hypothesise that “individual variations in the home advantage between referees is due to individual differences in the ability to cope with social pressure”.

 

How do they test this? Well, if the hypothesis is true, one should expect “to observe differences between referees in the way the level of pressure affects the home advantage”. So they added in crowd figures into the model. And from this they learnt that the amount of bias shown by individual referees changes as the size of the crowd changes. For some, big crowds make little difference, but for others, it makes a large difference.

 

The overall impact of crowd size for a typical referee was really quite large, as the graphic demonstrates. Again, a very interesting result from the Pages.

 

One final point. When we did this work this year on the Barclays Premier League, we acquitted referees. This may be because of our methods (we did not use goal difference) or our sample size (much smaller). But it could be because Premier League referees do better.

 

[Heron]

I actually believe it had a massive effect last night. Everyone was buzzing for the game and that transferred onto the pitch.

[macca888]

Home advantage? Absolutely, for a variety of different reasons including Psychological, travel, strange beds, away from family, breaking routines, pitch sizes and conditions etc etc.

 

If you look at Liverpool, as the players walk out, there is a sign in the tunnell, "THIS IS ANFIELD" and I have been told first hand that this sign sends shivers down a players spine as they run out to be greeted by the crowd. Not many teams win there.

 

It is easier for a player to rock up to a home game on a saturday afternoon after spending time relaxing with the family in the morning than it is for a player to arrive after a long coach journey or flight. A couple of years ago, one team had a particularly turbulent flight to Portsmouth and ending up getting thumped.

 

Pitch sizes can effect away teams. A number of years ago, I coached a side here in Australia where our pitch had a steep gradient. I alwys instructed my captain to kick down in the second half and most opposition captains chose to kick downhill in the first half thinking it was an advantage. We set our stall out to defend deeper in the first half and pushed up in the second when the opposition started to tire. Out of 14 home games, we won 13 and several of those games were winners in the last 5 to 10 minutes.

[Pilko]

I actually believe it had a massive effect last night. Everyone was buzzing for the game and that transferred onto the pitch.

 

[JH]

I actually believe it had a massive effect last night. Everyone was buzzing for the game and that transferred onto the pitch.

 

 

 

If it'd been in Cardiff last night, with the same teams, we wouldn't have seen the same performance and result IMO.