The Home Advantage Phenomenon
The ‘home advantage’ is a concept that has long been talked about within professional and amateur sports, but do teams really enjoy a home advantage? Well, in short, yes. When you delve into the hard statistics the home team does undoubtedly enjoy a significant advantage almost universally across all sports. The numbers are conclusive but don’t explain why the home team holds such a large advantage.
There has been substantial research into home field advantage, especially in American sports. In College Football, just under 9,000 games played since 1997 were analysed and it was found that only 40.03% of those games were won by the away team (3552 games) which represents a clear home advantage. Over the same period, the Las Vegas bookmakers predicted that the away team would win only 36.39% of the matches. That means on 323 occasions the bookmaker predicted that the home team would win and then they lost. This represents a slight overestimation of the home team’s advantage.
The conclusive nature of the statistics continues into European sports, especially rugby. In the Top 14 (France’s premier rugby league) a staggering 74% of the matches are won by the home team whilst in the Six Nations 61% of matches were won at home between 2000 and 2007 (although this would be higher if Italy weren’t so poor).
In the book Scorecasting by Toby Moskowitz, a behavioural economist and Professor at Yale, and Jon Wertheim, a Sports Illustrated writer, they analyse the differences in home advantage between the 5 main leagues in America: Major League Baseball; the National Hockey League; the National Football League; the National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer. The home game win percentages for each league are outlined below:
MLB: 53.9% (since 1903)
NHL: 55.7%
NFL: 57.5% (since 1966)
NBA: 60.5%
MLS: 69.1% (since 2002)
These numbers produced several questions: namely why does this advantage exist at all and why does the MLS have such a high home win percentage in comparison to the other leagues?
There are lots of potential reasons to consider. Crowd support, noise, the athlete’s familiarity with the venue as well as travel fatigue for the away team are all generally considered to be the root of home court/field advantage. Instead, their conclusion was somewhat surprising.
‘When athletes are at home, they don’t seem to hit or pitch better in baseball … or pass better in football. The crowd doesn’t appear to be helping the home team or harming the visitors. We checked “the vicissitudes of travel” off the list. And although scheduling bias against the road team explains some of the home-field advantage, particularly in college sports, it’s irrelevant in many sports.’
If these popular explanations don’t explain home advantage, what does?
Moskowitz and Wertheim found that it’s the officials. The home team gets slightly preferential treatment from the officials although this bias is involuntary (it’s not in the private interest of a referee to be biased as it effects their re-appointment probability) and subconscious. This occurs because referees, being human, are social creatures so every once in a while, they conform with the crowd and make a decision that makes a lot of noisy, close-by people very happy.
This also explains why football and rugby have such large home-field advantages where the referees have such high levels of autonomy and influence on the game so their decisions have more of an impact on the outcome.
This is argued convincingly by German academic Thomas Dohmen in a research paper titled ‘In Support of the Supporters? Do Social Forces Shape Decisions of the Impartial?’, in which he investigated referees’ neutrality by studying the actions and decision-making of referees in 2754 matches spanning 9 seasons. Dohmen writes:
‘Those, who are appointed to be impartial, tend to favor the home team as they systematically award more injury time in close matches when the home team is behind. Further evidence for similar home bias comes from referees’ wrong, or at least disputable, decisions to award goals and penalty shots. The severity of social pressure, measured by the crowd’s composition and proximity to the action, determines its effect. Not all agents are affected by social pressure to the same degree.’
An important aspect of his study alluded to in the above passage is the crowd’s proximity to the action. He found that stadiums that have a running track between the pitch and the stands (the Max-Morlock-Stadion in Nuremberg is a good example) experience less of a home-field advantage than stadiums without a running track because the officials are not as susceptible to getting caught up in the home-crowd emotion as they aren’t as close to the stands.
To conclude, the home-field advantage is statistically proven beyond doubt in almost all mainstream sports. The studies referenced in this piece make it clear that the primary reason for home advantage is the crowd’s psychological effect on the referee’s decision making but other factors such as travel fatigue, familiarity with their surroundings and crowd support, although comparatively inconsequential, can’t be fully discounted.
Barnaby Shand, Year 11, October 2017.