4 ms·
This is England, where all of the grounds are in driving distance of each other and an "away" game might well be in the same city. It would be interesting to c
by dmurray 6y ago
This is England, where all of the grounds are in driving distance of each other and an "away" game might well be in the same city.
It would be interesting to control for distance travelled, and see if a third factor emerges where teams play worse even if they can stay at home and don't have a significant train/plane/bus journey to make. The third factor could be very minor differences between the grounds, or a pure placebo effect, or a tactical reaction to the placebo effect (teams often set up more conservatively away from home because they expect to be at a disadvantage).
(I haven't read the article yet - I've used up all my free Economist articles - so maybe it touches on this, but it's neglected in your post).
- gooseserbus 6y agoThe article covers leagues all across Europe not just England
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI actually explored all those in my research a few years ago, but stateside and with baseball as the subject: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/homefield-advantage/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/homefield-advantage/
- dmurray 6y agoI don't see an attempt there to control for distance. If I'm reading it right, you've explored the variation in home advantage over time, between ballparks, and between teams (which turns out to be significantly different from ballparks - a surprising finding). The very last paragraph says you've left examining the effect of distance to "a better study". What am I missing? I've seen results before from American sports saying travelling East is worse for a team than travelling West, because of jetlag effects, and travelling to Colorado is bad, because of altitude effects. Those results would be tricky to tease out with your approach: if West Coast teams consistently perform 5% worse when playing on the East Coast, you can't tell that apart from East Coast teams playing 5% worse on the West coast by looking solely at win rates. The study I'm thinking of did something clever with looking at multi-game series to evaluate the jetlag effect.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThe assumption was that teams from the Midwest would suffer least if it were purely distance (as they have the least shift/average travel) but that didn't bear out.
- dmurray 6y agoHave they? They have to travel half the distance, 100% of the time, compared to the coastal teams who travel the full distance across America half the time. That's in the "spherical cow" situation where all the East teams play in New York and all the West Coast teams play in LA...but if you add up the real miles travelled its probably within 20%.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoSure, but they never\* have to travel the full coast-to-coast, which is presumably where the worst of its effects, if any, would be realized.