6 ms·

Vanishing home field advantage in English football

59 points by Vermin2000 1y ago

Vermin2000 1y ago
Home field advantage is a real thing and is measurable. Strikingly, it's been declining steadily and consistently since WWII. The charts in the blog post are interactive and you can zoom into the data.
- reedf1 1y ago
  Mike Woodward - I'm looking forward to your AI Summary/Posting Bot post.
  - Vermin2000 1y ago
    Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven't used AI for any kind of text generation for this piece or the summary. I did however use Cursor to build my Python analysis code. I find AI code completion very helpful, but AI text is just blah.
- walthamstow 1y ago
  It's unfair you've been downvoted for a helpful summary of your post
amelius 1y ago
What I want to see is an analysis of how likely it is that the winner of a match/tournament is also the best team. Basically attaching a p-value to soccer. Then analyze how the rules of the game can be changed such that this p-value is increased.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  What's your intention, the best team should always win? You would ruin football, that's the magic of it.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    That unironically is the opinion of many people. It comes up again and again, and is a culture clash that is not limited to but particularly prevalent between US and European perspectives. US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series". All of that is designed to maximise the chance that the "winner" and the "best team" are aligned. Meanwhile in UK competitions, an entire yearly competition can be decided by a bad 90 minutes, such as ManU losing to York City, something the fans of both sides likely still remember 30 or so years later. This argument frequently plays out in e-sports, which still try to find a good balance between the two, with the "best players should win" crowd wanting anti-climatic double-elimination, and the "Let's have more meaningful games" crown preferring single elimination. "Competitions should be designed to find who the best team is" is a statement that many would agree with, but "Competitions should provide excitement and allow for upsets" is one I think is just as important, if not more so. Another similar culture-clash is the concept of relegation versus franchising, as well as the concept of "drafting" in a (failed?) attempt to even out the competition.
    - Rotoke 1y ago
      [dead]
    - Certhas 1y ago
      I would argue that salary caps + drafts are very successful at evening out the competition. European football leagues have come to be dominated by very, very few clubs. Bayern, Barca and Real, PSG, to a lesser degree Manchester City, have been absolutely dominant in their domestic leagues. In the case of Bayern winning 15 of the last 20, and 12 of the last 13 titles. PSG has won 11/13 most recent titles. In the meantime the NBA has had 7 different champions the last 7 years.
    - rkangel 1y ago
      > US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series". Except if you look at the NFL - the most popular sport in the US by far - the playoffs are "Best of 1". The NFL also enforces very close parity which gives a lot of unpredictability. You combine those and you get a lot of upsets.
- smcl 1y ago
  How are you defining "best" here?
  - amelius 1y ago
    Best can be defined as the team that wins most often if a large number of matches are played (between the same two teams).
    - smcl 1y ago
      The winner of a tournament is by that definition the best, it is basically a tautology.
      - amelius 1y ago
        I mean a large number of matches played between the same two teams. You can compare it to how it is done in medicine. Imagine a match between a drug and migraine. Would we only do a single test to determine if the drug "wins" against migraine? Of course not. We do many tests and determine a p-value. We can do the same thing in soccer. Now, of course we cannot do this in a real tournament (it would take too long), but we can draw conclusions from such a test, or several such tests.
        smcl 1y ago
        The problem there is that there is often far too much variation in the teams year on year - squads change as players get bought, sold or retire, managers come and go. And when you do find a pattern I can virtually guarantee that it won't be due to some novel gamesmanship, but rather finance. It is no secret that the most successful teams are those who are wealthy enough to able to buy (and pay) the most sought-after players and coaching staff, and build and maintain the most sophisticated training facilities (and a whole host of other smaller things that cost money). If we take a look at the finalists of the Europa League this year you can see that the money they both spent on their squad dwarfs all of their previous opponents in the competition combined: https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1krtgtt/combined_purchase_value_of_manchester_united_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1krtgtt/combined_pu... (ideally you'd factor in wages too but that's harder data to get hold of, but it'll paint a similar picture of not a more polarised one). What is really interesting and far more worth studying is that there are some very fun outliers - clubs like Bodø/Glimt who have a miniscule annual budget but have overperformed in European competition in recent years. They reached the semi-finals of the Europa League - beating Lazio, Olympiacos, Porto along the way - and in previous years have had similarly deep runs where they battered Roma 6-1 and beat Besiktas and Celtic both home and away. All of the teams I mentioned Bodo/Glimr defeating will have an annual budget that is 10 time theirs (or more) and will frequently make high profile international signings, while Bodo spend frugally and have a predominantly (if not all) domestic squad. I mentioned Manchester United and Tottenham - they're also outliers worth studying, but in another way. They were both utterly woeful in the league last season despite having astronomical budgets. If you can crack what causes a Bodø/Glimt, a Manchester United or a Tottenham then you'd be a very valuable addition to the backroom staff of any football club with a desire to punch above their weight...
- rkangel 1y ago
  I think there is a "best" p-value, and I don't think it's the "highest" p-value. You don't want it too low, because then quality becomes meaningless. You do want to give good results to good teams. But there is also don't want it to be perfect - you want some unpredictability in sports. You don't want every match to be a foregone conclusion, and you want every supporter to be able to have some reasonable hope. There is some data suggesting that one of the reasons that English football is popular is because it's low scoring. This increases the chance that random variation gives an "incorrect" result. In this hypothesis, unpredictability adds excitement and builds popularity. The NFL achieves similar results a different way - various forms of consistency and negative feedback (salary cap, draft order, schedule) to keep teams very close in ability. This means that small differences like a game plan for a particular week can regularly affect results, and keeps predictability low.
  - ta1243 1y ago
    > you want every supporter to be able to have some reasonable hope. The England game a couple of nights ago. On paper England were better before hand, but Italy were winning until the last minute of injury time. Some England fans had already left the stadium, then in goes the goal, then extra time, then just as it looks like another horrendous penalty shootout there's a foul in the box and England take it, then the goalie stops it, but then it goes in. Certainly a rollercoaster for both sets of fans.
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  There exist metrics like ELO or GLIKO that can be used to rate the overall performance of teams. This is usually a good predictor for the overall winrate of a team A. But doesn't predict as well whether A will win against a particular B. This is because there is a lot more going on in particular matchups that is difficult to capture mathematically. It is not uncommon to see A beating B consistently, B beating C consistently, and C beating A consistently. Perhaps a neural network can be trained on a lot more data to make predictions for each match, and I imagine who gamble a lot have probably done things like this already. But then you don't have a number to optimize.
AndrewOMartin 1y ago
There was an article, I can't recall if it was a reliable source, that said the home field advantage is vanishing because "before" if many players were playing away they'd take advantage of their being away from home by going out, getting drunk and staying out late in the hope of taking one or more people back to their hotel. These days, if you're a star athlete you can live on Tinder and fairly reliably have someone turn up to your hotel room. You stay reasonably sober and get an early night. I'd not be surprised to hear that this is complete nonsense, but it's a memorable story. A simpler version of this story is that people have steadily drunk less since WW2 when going out, and you're more likely to go out when away from home.
- dmurray 1y ago
  > A simpler version of this story is that people have steadily drunk less since WW2 when going out Certainly athletes have got more professional, and less likely to drink at all, or during the season, or the night before a game.
- ensemblehq 1y ago
  I was actually going to comment on the same fact about professionalism growing into English football. Back when the Premier League era began compared to now is just a whole different level as what most players have been saying on SkySports. You see players playing in their mid and late 30s. I was also going to hypothesize that players are significantly mentally equipped to cope with away pressures and their tactical shape stays more consistent regardless of being home or away.
chilmers 1y ago
It'd be interesting to plot this against incidences of fouls and misconduct over the same time period. If play has gradually gotten cleaner, this would provide less opportunity for referee bias to affect outcomes even if referees themselves are not becoming less biased over time.
lordnacho 1y ago
The dataset you need is the PL2 or academy matches. I don't think anyone shows up to those games, but the players are vying to be full premier league professionals. So travel arrangements would be similar, physical fitness similar, tactics similar, but there would be no fans. As for the time trend, I suspect professionalization was happening slowly, then quickly. Of course there have been fully paid footballers for a long time, but if you look at stories from the 80s and early 90s, the guys would still smoke and eat burgers. It's only in recent decades that the stops have been pulled out, and everyone started doing full on sports science to maximize every chance. Having absolutely everyone optimized physically also means you can explore strategies that used to be impossible. If you know you're at 80% due to traveling, your gegenpress is going to be a bit less attractive.
Fluorescence 1y ago
Home advantage wasn't an accident for Jeff Beck, the Cambridge United manager in the '90s because he used groundsmanship as a weapon: - plough the pitch to kneecap expensive teams with running/passing games - narrow the pitch dimensions to minimise fancy wide plays - grow the grass long and pour sand in the corners so long balls less likely to go out He then recruited the tallest forwards he could and the strategy was simple, hoof it to the big fellas up front. None of this running/passing nonsense that requires money/talent. I expect regulations might have improved since then...
- gadders 1y ago
  I don't think test cricket is quite as bad, but pretty sure wickets are prepared to suit certain bowling styles.
- ignoramous 1y ago
  Broadcasters rule football. Even if there was no regulation, the broadcasters would be absolutely livid if their audience wanted to see the best players & top clubs play tiki-taka but were served smash & grab. The Premier League & the Champions League are money spinning ventures for a reason. What you say still happens in International Cricket, but not usually for club tournaments like The 100 or the Indian Premier League.
  - smcl 1y ago
    The broadcasters have absolutely no say whatsoever in how a groundsman prepares their pitch for an upcoming fixtures. In fact the kind of gamesmanship we are talking about happened as recently as the last few games of the most recent English season. Sunderland played Coventry in a two-legged playoff semi-final, having won the first leg 2-1 in Coventry they had a one-goal advantage going into the home fixture. Coventry had a player Milan van Ewijk who was able to deliver a very long and precise throw-in, so any throw in Sunderland conceded within 20-ish yards of their own goal would basically be like conceding a corner (a set-piece seen as a good goal-scoring opportunity). Sunderland mitigated against this by shrinking the distance between the touchline and the advertising boards at the side of the pitch, shortening the distance van Ewijk could run prior to taking his throw-in, and stunting his ability to turn it into a goal-scoring opportunity.
jansan 1y ago
My first thought was that maybe fan culture and atmosphere has changed, which would have a more noticeable effect in the higher leagues, because lower leagues are still hilarious [1][2]. But the home advantage seems to affect all leagues the same, so I am probably wrong. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXmv7VK_110 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXmv7VK_110 [2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U (uncensored: https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/7336597718896299296?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/733659771889629... )
- toyg 1y ago
  but the efforts to stamp out hooliganism have been harsh pretty much at all levels, in the English game. I think that's an overlooked item. It would be good to compare trends across different leagues, where there was little or no equivalent effort.
walthamstow 1y ago
I remember the COVID football days. Soulless games taking place in echoey, empty grounds seemingly for no reason at all. Little wonder the home team advantage fell off. Football without fans is nothing.
- smcl 1y ago
  > Soulless games But enough about the English Premier League!
- mathw 1y ago
  They had to keep those sweet TV millions flowing in though! And keep players in condition for when the crowds could come back without too much risk of death. Those are both pretty good reasons to keep having the games.
rhplus 1y ago
It’s surprising what range of pitch size and slope are allowed in professional football. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch While FIFA recommends a specific size for pro teams, a legal pitch can have widths range from 46 to 91 metres and lengths of 91 to 119 metres. That’s a possible ratio range of 1:1 to 1:2.58. I could imagine that stadium upgrades have meant that pitches don’t have as much variation as in the past too.
- mfro 1y ago
  Fortunately most of the top level teams stick to the same dimensions: https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/ https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/ https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-top-european-soccer-leagues-20230509-WST-432102.html https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-...
- PJDK 1y ago
  It makes sense when you remember that the vast majority of football is played by purely amateur players - the rules need to handle a village school as well as the world cup final.
  - brudgers 1y ago
    There are so many football matches that anything that can happen probably will happen if it hasn’t already. The LOTG reflect that statistical reality.
- nsavage 1y ago
  In case anyone is interested, baseball has a similar variety in stadiums. Fenway Park comes to mind as a field with particular unique circumstances, like the Green Monster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Monster). It also feels relevant to note that air pressure plays a role, and that players have an easier time hitting home runs in high altitude places like Colorado, so the game isn't the same everywhere.
  - 1y ago
trevvr 1y ago
I've looked at this question in Rugby Union. In my opinion. The travel issue is the main factor for home advantage. Travelling is physically and mentally tiring. If you can ease the travel methods. Where you either cultivate a team environment where people will be at ease being away from home / home base. Or travel earlier and in better form. Then you will end up with better away results.
- Aromasin 1y ago
  In Union, many of the popular leagues are international clubs level. For most of their history, they were split into Southern and Northern hemisphere leagues. Recently that shifted, and the South African teams joined the United Rugby Championship which is European (Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales, and before Top 14 became preferred, France). This was because, despite the historical significance, the time zone difference between the South African and Australia/New Zealand teams were too severe. Now South Africa is in the United Champinoship, they only play in a +/-2 hour difference in terms of time zone.
zimpenfish 1y ago
> Given that the “only” COVID difference is the absence of supporters I think the potential confounders (training was disrupted for months, games were played in summer months, season was compressed, etc.) make that "only" do far too much work here.
igsomething 1y ago
It would be useful to compare with other leagues where home field advantage is significant. I do not have any data but as a football fan I suspect the following variables are important: - England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team. - England is also a small country. The away team can arrive at the stadium within the day. Not only it means they are better rested but also home fans cannot bother them at the hotel making noise, throwing fireworks, etc. preventing them from sleeping. - The FA is not as corrupt. Sure, certain teams can get away with playing dirty, but in general referees will show red card to a home team player, or call out a penalty for the away team. - Less threatening environment at the stadium, both for the away team players and the referees. Nobody is throwing food, beer or anything at the players during the game, and hooligans will not try to harm the referee if the home team loses.
- dmoy 1y ago
  > England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team Also pretty flat. No 1000m+ altitude differences. Competing in Colorado suuuucks.
bialczabub 1y ago
Tobias J. Moskowitz, a UChicago Economist, and L. Jon Wertheim studied home field advantage across all sports years ago, and concluded referee bias was real and was the driving force behind home advantage. It's explained in the book "Scorecasting" For me, their findings were vindicated during the pandemic, when HFA all but disappeared. My guess is more recent decay might be because of VAR and goal line technology, which have become more integral to the game in recent seasons.
philk10 1y ago
I've listened to Lee Dixon and Graeme LeSaux talk about this when they're commentating on matches and how when they were at home they knew exactly where they were on the pitch by a combination of the same fans/advertising hoardings/stand structure which helped their game
furyofantares 1y ago
Home advantage is interesting to me because of it existing in essentially every sport and it's almost always small enough to not matter a lot but large enough to notice. Lots of factors are attributed but I've never seen someone try to analyze those factors. You could probably do some minor rules tweak to get rid of it or reduce it further - but I think it's actually a good thing to have a noticeable but small home advantage. You have the same number of home and away games so it evens out in the regular season. So a little nudge for the team that everyone bought tickets to watch seems alright. I think it's desirable in the playoffs too, even if your goal is for the best team to win the tournament, not just from an entertainment perspective. We deliberately stack the playoffs for the teams that did best in the regular season, both by seeding and by who gets home advantage. There's lots of entertainment reasons this makes sense to me, but it also makes sense to me in terms of making the best team most likely to win. The playoffs are usually less data than the regular season. So this is a way of letting the regular season data have more of an influence on the outcome of the championship.
lazyant 1y ago
from another study, the home advantage is due to ref's unconscious bias, rather than an effect from the public. So all the new tech (VAR) surely has helped reduce that bias.

59 points by Vermin2000 1y ago

Vermin2000 1y ago

Home field advantage is a real thing and is measurable. Strikingly, it's been declining steadily and consistently since WWII. The charts in the blog post are interactive and you can zoom into the data.

reedf1 1y ago
Mike Woodward - I'm looking forward to your AI Summary/Posting Bot post.
- Vermin2000 1y ago
  Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven't used AI for any kind of text generation for this piece or the summary. I did however use Cursor to build my Python analysis code. I find AI code completion very helpful, but AI text is just blah.
walthamstow 1y ago
It's unfair you've been downvoted for a helpful summary of your post

amelius 1y ago

What I want to see is an analysis of how likely it is that the winner of a match/tournament is also the best team. Basically attaching a p-value to soccer. Then analyze how the rules of the game can be changed such that this p-value is increased.

owebmaster 1y ago
What's your intention, the best team should always win? You would ruin football, that's the magic of it.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  That unironically is the opinion of many people. It comes up again and again, and is a culture clash that is not limited to but particularly prevalent between US and European perspectives. US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series". All of that is designed to maximise the chance that the "winner" and the "best team" are aligned. Meanwhile in UK competitions, an entire yearly competition can be decided by a bad 90 minutes, such as ManU losing to York City, something the fans of both sides likely still remember 30 or so years later. This argument frequently plays out in e-sports, which still try to find a good balance between the two, with the "best players should win" crowd wanting anti-climatic double-elimination, and the "Let's have more meaningful games" crown preferring single elimination. "Competitions should be designed to find who the best team is" is a statement that many would agree with, but "Competitions should provide excitement and allow for upsets" is one I think is just as important, if not more so. Another similar culture-clash is the concept of relegation versus franchising, as well as the concept of "drafting" in a (failed?) attempt to even out the competition.
  - Rotoke 1y ago
    [dead]
  - Certhas 1y ago
    I would argue that salary caps + drafts are very successful at evening out the competition. European football leagues have come to be dominated by very, very few clubs. Bayern, Barca and Real, PSG, to a lesser degree Manchester City, have been absolutely dominant in their domestic leagues. In the case of Bayern winning 15 of the last 20, and 12 of the last 13 titles. PSG has won 11/13 most recent titles. In the meantime the NBA has had 7 different champions the last 7 years.
  - rkangel 1y ago
    > US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series". Except if you look at the NFL - the most popular sport in the US by far - the playoffs are "Best of 1". The NFL also enforces very close parity which gives a lot of unpredictability. You combine those and you get a lot of upsets.
smcl 1y ago
How are you defining "best" here?
- amelius 1y ago
  Best can be defined as the team that wins most often if a large number of matches are played (between the same two teams).
  - smcl 1y ago
    The winner of a tournament is by that definition the best, it is basically a tautology.
    - amelius 1y ago
      I mean a large number of matches played between the same two teams. You can compare it to how it is done in medicine. Imagine a match between a drug and migraine. Would we only do a single test to determine if the drug "wins" against migraine? Of course not. We do many tests and determine a p-value. We can do the same thing in soccer. Now, of course we cannot do this in a real tournament (it would take too long), but we can draw conclusions from such a test, or several such tests.
      - smcl 1y ago
        The problem there is that there is often far too much variation in the teams year on year - squads change as players get bought, sold or retire, managers come and go. And when you do find a pattern I can virtually guarantee that it won't be due to some novel gamesmanship, but rather finance. It is no secret that the most successful teams are those who are wealthy enough to able to buy (and pay) the most sought-after players and coaching staff, and build and maintain the most sophisticated training facilities (and a whole host of other smaller things that cost money). If we take a look at the finalists of the Europa League this year you can see that the money they both spent on their squad dwarfs all of their previous opponents in the competition combined: https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1krtgtt/combined_purchase_value_of_manchester_united_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1krtgtt/combined_pu... (ideally you'd factor in wages too but that's harder data to get hold of, but it'll paint a similar picture of not a more polarised one). What is really interesting and far more worth studying is that there are some very fun outliers - clubs like Bodø/Glimt who have a miniscule annual budget but have overperformed in European competition in recent years. They reached the semi-finals of the Europa League - beating Lazio, Olympiacos, Porto along the way - and in previous years have had similarly deep runs where they battered Roma 6-1 and beat Besiktas and Celtic both home and away. All of the teams I mentioned Bodo/Glimr defeating will have an annual budget that is 10 time theirs (or more) and will frequently make high profile international signings, while Bodo spend frugally and have a predominantly (if not all) domestic squad. I mentioned Manchester United and Tottenham - they're also outliers worth studying, but in another way. They were both utterly woeful in the league last season despite having astronomical budgets. If you can crack what causes a Bodø/Glimt, a Manchester United or a Tottenham then you'd be a very valuable addition to the backroom staff of any football club with a desire to punch above their weight...
rkangel 1y ago
I think there is a "best" p-value, and I don't think it's the "highest" p-value. You don't want it too low, because then quality becomes meaningless. You do want to give good results to good teams. But there is also don't want it to be perfect - you want some unpredictability in sports. You don't want every match to be a foregone conclusion, and you want every supporter to be able to have some reasonable hope. There is some data suggesting that one of the reasons that English football is popular is because it's low scoring. This increases the chance that random variation gives an "incorrect" result. In this hypothesis, unpredictability adds excitement and builds popularity. The NFL achieves similar results a different way - various forms of consistency and negative feedback (salary cap, draft order, schedule) to keep teams very close in ability. This means that small differences like a game plan for a particular week can regularly affect results, and keeps predictability low.
- ta1243 1y ago
  > you want every supporter to be able to have some reasonable hope. The England game a couple of nights ago. On paper England were better before hand, but Italy were winning until the last minute of injury time. Some England fans had already left the stadium, then in goes the goal, then extra time, then just as it looks like another horrendous penalty shootout there's a foul in the box and England take it, then the goalie stops it, but then it goes in. Certainly a rollercoaster for both sets of fans.
abdullahkhalids 1y ago
There exist metrics like ELO or GLIKO that can be used to rate the overall performance of teams. This is usually a good predictor for the overall winrate of a team A. But doesn't predict as well whether A will win against a particular B. This is because there is a lot more going on in particular matchups that is difficult to capture mathematically. It is not uncommon to see A beating B consistently, B beating C consistently, and C beating A consistently. Perhaps a neural network can be trained on a lot more data to make predictions for each match, and I imagine who gamble a lot have probably done things like this already. But then you don't have a number to optimize.

AndrewOMartin 1y ago

There was an article, I can't recall if it was a reliable source, that said the home field advantage is vanishing because "before" if many players were playing away they'd take advantage of their being away from home by going out, getting drunk and staying out late in the hope of taking one or more people back to their hotel. These days, if you're a star athlete you can live on Tinder and fairly reliably have someone turn up to your hotel room. You stay reasonably sober and get an early night. I'd not be surprised to hear that this is complete nonsense, but it's a memorable story. A simpler version of this story is that people have steadily drunk less since WW2 when going out, and you're more likely to go out when away from home.

dmurray 1y ago
> A simpler version of this story is that people have steadily drunk less since WW2 when going out Certainly athletes have got more professional, and less likely to drink at all, or during the season, or the night before a game.
ensemblehq 1y ago
I was actually going to comment on the same fact about professionalism growing into English football. Back when the Premier League era began compared to now is just a whole different level as what most players have been saying on SkySports. You see players playing in their mid and late 30s. I was also going to hypothesize that players are significantly mentally equipped to cope with away pressures and their tactical shape stays more consistent regardless of being home or away.

chilmers 1y ago

It'd be interesting to plot this against incidences of fouls and misconduct over the same time period. If play has gradually gotten cleaner, this would provide less opportunity for referee bias to affect outcomes even if referees themselves are not becoming less biased over time.

lordnacho 1y ago

The dataset you need is the PL2 or academy matches. I don't think anyone shows up to those games, but the players are vying to be full premier league professionals. So travel arrangements would be similar, physical fitness similar, tactics similar, but there would be no fans. As for the time trend, I suspect professionalization was happening slowly, then quickly. Of course there have been fully paid footballers for a long time, but if you look at stories from the 80s and early 90s, the guys would still smoke and eat burgers. It's only in recent decades that the stops have been pulled out, and everyone started doing full on sports science to maximize every chance. Having absolutely everyone optimized physically also means you can explore strategies that used to be impossible. If you know you're at 80% due to traveling, your gegenpress is going to be a bit less attractive.

Fluorescence 1y ago

Home advantage wasn't an accident for Jeff Beck, the Cambridge United manager in the '90s because he used groundsmanship as a weapon: - plough the pitch to kneecap expensive teams with running/passing games - narrow the pitch dimensions to minimise fancy wide plays - grow the grass long and pour sand in the corners so long balls less likely to go out He then recruited the tallest forwards he could and the strategy was simple, hoof it to the big fellas up front. None of this running/passing nonsense that requires money/talent. I expect regulations might have improved since then...

gadders 1y ago
I don't think test cricket is quite as bad, but pretty sure wickets are prepared to suit certain bowling styles.
ignoramous 1y ago
Broadcasters rule football. Even if there was no regulation, the broadcasters would be absolutely livid if their audience wanted to see the best players & top clubs play tiki-taka but were served smash & grab. The Premier League & the Champions League are money spinning ventures for a reason. What you say still happens in International Cricket, but not usually for club tournaments like The 100 or the Indian Premier League.
- smcl 1y ago
  The broadcasters have absolutely no say whatsoever in how a groundsman prepares their pitch for an upcoming fixtures. In fact the kind of gamesmanship we are talking about happened as recently as the last few games of the most recent English season. Sunderland played Coventry in a two-legged playoff semi-final, having won the first leg 2-1 in Coventry they had a one-goal advantage going into the home fixture. Coventry had a player Milan van Ewijk who was able to deliver a very long and precise throw-in, so any throw in Sunderland conceded within 20-ish yards of their own goal would basically be like conceding a corner (a set-piece seen as a good goal-scoring opportunity). Sunderland mitigated against this by shrinking the distance between the touchline and the advertising boards at the side of the pitch, shortening the distance van Ewijk could run prior to taking his throw-in, and stunting his ability to turn it into a goal-scoring opportunity.

jansan 1y ago

My first thought was that maybe fan culture and atmosphere has changed, which would have a more noticeable effect in the higher leagues, because lower leagues are still hilarious [1][2]. But the home advantage seems to affect all leagues the same, so I am probably wrong. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXmv7VK_110 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXmv7VK_110 [2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U (uncensored: https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/7336597718896299296?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/733659771889629... )

toyg 1y ago
but the efforts to stamp out hooliganism have been harsh pretty much at all levels, in the English game. I think that's an overlooked item. It would be good to compare trends across different leagues, where there was little or no equivalent effort.

walthamstow 1y ago

I remember the COVID football days. Soulless games taking place in echoey, empty grounds seemingly for no reason at all. Little wonder the home team advantage fell off. Football without fans is nothing.

smcl 1y ago
> Soulless games But enough about the English Premier League!
mathw 1y ago
They had to keep those sweet TV millions flowing in though! And keep players in condition for when the crowds could come back without too much risk of death. Those are both pretty good reasons to keep having the games.

rhplus 1y ago

It’s surprising what range of pitch size and slope are allowed in professional football. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch While FIFA recommends a specific size for pro teams, a legal pitch can have widths range from 46 to 91 metres and lengths of 91 to 119 metres. That’s a possible ratio range of 1:1 to 1:2.58. I could imagine that stadium upgrades have meant that pitches don’t have as much variation as in the past too.

mfro 1y ago
Fortunately most of the top level teams stick to the same dimensions: https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/ https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/ https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-top-european-soccer-leagues-20230509-WST-432102.html https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-...
PJDK 1y ago
It makes sense when you remember that the vast majority of football is played by purely amateur players - the rules need to handle a village school as well as the world cup final.
- brudgers 1y ago
  There are so many football matches that anything that can happen probably will happen if it hasn’t already. The LOTG reflect that statistical reality.
nsavage 1y ago
In case anyone is interested, baseball has a similar variety in stadiums. Fenway Park comes to mind as a field with particular unique circumstances, like the Green Monster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Monster). It also feels relevant to note that air pressure plays a role, and that players have an easier time hitting home runs in high altitude places like Colorado, so the game isn't the same everywhere.
- 1y ago

trevvr 1y ago

I've looked at this question in Rugby Union. In my opinion. The travel issue is the main factor for home advantage. Travelling is physically and mentally tiring. If you can ease the travel methods. Where you either cultivate a team environment where people will be at ease being away from home / home base. Or travel earlier and in better form. Then you will end up with better away results.

Aromasin 1y ago
In Union, many of the popular leagues are international clubs level. For most of their history, they were split into Southern and Northern hemisphere leagues. Recently that shifted, and the South African teams joined the United Rugby Championship which is European (Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales, and before Top 14 became preferred, France). This was because, despite the historical significance, the time zone difference between the South African and Australia/New Zealand teams were too severe. Now South Africa is in the United Champinoship, they only play in a +/-2 hour difference in terms of time zone.

zimpenfish 1y ago

> Given that the “only” COVID difference is the absence of supporters I think the potential confounders (training was disrupted for months, games were played in summer months, season was compressed, etc.) make that "only" do far too much work here.

igsomething 1y ago

It would be useful to compare with other leagues where home field advantage is significant. I do not have any data but as a football fan I suspect the following variables are important: - England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team. - England is also a small country. The away team can arrive at the stadium within the day. Not only it means they are better rested but also home fans cannot bother them at the hotel making noise, throwing fireworks, etc. preventing them from sleeping. - The FA is not as corrupt. Sure, certain teams can get away with playing dirty, but in general referees will show red card to a home team player, or call out a penalty for the away team. - Less threatening environment at the stadium, both for the away team players and the referees. Nobody is throwing food, beer or anything at the players during the game, and hooligans will not try to harm the referee if the home team loses.

dmoy 1y ago
> England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team Also pretty flat. No 1000m+ altitude differences. Competing in Colorado suuuucks.

bialczabub 1y ago

Tobias J. Moskowitz, a UChicago Economist, and L. Jon Wertheim studied home field advantage across all sports years ago, and concluded referee bias was real and was the driving force behind home advantage. It's explained in the book "Scorecasting" For me, their findings were vindicated during the pandemic, when HFA all but disappeared. My guess is more recent decay might be because of VAR and goal line technology, which have become more integral to the game in recent seasons.

philk10 1y ago

I've listened to Lee Dixon and Graeme LeSaux talk about this when they're commentating on matches and how when they were at home they knew exactly where they were on the pitch by a combination of the same fans/advertising hoardings/stand structure which helped their game

furyofantares 1y ago

Home advantage is interesting to me because of it existing in essentially every sport and it's almost always small enough to not matter a lot but large enough to notice. Lots of factors are attributed but I've never seen someone try to analyze those factors. You could probably do some minor rules tweak to get rid of it or reduce it further - but I think it's actually a good thing to have a noticeable but small home advantage. You have the same number of home and away games so it evens out in the regular season. So a little nudge for the team that everyone bought tickets to watch seems alright. I think it's desirable in the playoffs too, even if your goal is for the best team to win the tournament, not just from an entertainment perspective. We deliberately stack the playoffs for the teams that did best in the regular season, both by seeding and by who gets home advantage. There's lots of entertainment reasons this makes sense to me, but it also makes sense to me in terms of making the best team most likely to win. The playoffs are usually less data than the regular season. So this is a way of letting the regular season data have more of an influence on the outcome of the championship.

lazyant 1y ago

from another study, the home advantage is due to ref's unconscious bias, rather than an effect from the public. So all the new tech (VAR) surely has helped reduce that bias.