Vanishing home field advantage in English football
blog.engora.com58 points by Vermin2000 6 days ago
58 points by Vermin2000 6 days 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...
The Goodison Park (built 1892) away dressing rooms are really Spartan and uncomfortable. They are poorly heated, are right under the stand (noisy), there's only one toilet etc.
I don't think Everton's home record can really get that much worse when they move into their new stadium next season though.
Some of the All or Nothing documentaries that cover Premier League teams include a lot of footage in the away dressing rooms, and they are almost all bad (though Goodison was weirdly cavernous and looks more annoying than normal).
Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.
I toured Stanford Bridge in the middle 2010s, they actually found uncomfortable away dressing rooms weren't the most effective as it either got the other team to go out and start warming up or riled them up.
When Mourinho started he brought in a sports psychologist who made the dressing rooms slightly heated with light pink walls and a comforting atmosphere. They ended up going 2+ years without a loss at home after that.
Norwich painted their away dressing room an effeminate shade of pastel pink because it supposedly lowers testosterone
Another classic result of British Scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_scientists_(meme)
Same with University of Iowa (American College Football)
https://www.ncaa.com/video/football/2014-09-12/traditions-io...
Reminder that the association of pink with femininity is a recent phenomenon. Before WW2, it used to be associated with masculinity.
'In 1918, an article in Ladies Home Journal advised: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”'
That may be true that a century ago baby girls and baby boys in the US were associated with different colors than today, but the reasoning of "pink, being a more decided and stronger color" seems suspect to me. How come dozens of flags of countries around the world feature the color blue and approximately none feature pink (Spain and Mexico have a small amount of pink in their coats of arms). When it came down to it, the designers of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and all of the Tribands, etc ... none of them thought, "yeah, lets add some pink to project strength".
Baby clothes use more faded colors because of the frequent washing, so it's pink or light blue. Many countries use red in their flags.
This would also presume that the strength and colorfastness of pink and blue pigments was different 100 years ago than it was today.
Which is a very safe assumption given advancements in chemistry, textiles, and industrial processes.
Most flags that have blue don't have sky blue, they have a darker blue. If pink was as dark it would be red.
I don't know if this is the explanation, but I remember reading about how men's shirts would often be pink from blood stains after hunting and skinning animals.
Interesting. Any source on why/when the switch happened?
There’s a claim that it was a marketing scheme in the 1940s to reduce the usefulness of hand-me-downs in families. My grandmother would have lived through that and I may see if she remembers anything about it. She was definitely babysitting or watching children by 1940.
That doesn't make sense to me US textiles were in high demand, though perhaps not in pink and blue starting around 1940 and by the end of the decade US consumers were getting quite wealthy. I'm not saying it didn't happen but I'd like to see a better reason than "companies love money" since if you loved money in the 1940s there were better ways to get it than trying to do some sort of marketing campaign to reverse a social standard (using a marketing industry that was much less advanced and pervasive no less.)
It seems your argument applies to fashion in general. But fashion is a well known phenomenon. How then can your argument be valid?
I don't think test cricket is quite as bad, but pretty sure wickets are prepared to suit certain bowling styles.
I do think that smooth grass fields (I mean billiard-like smooth) greatly help teams with the best players that can pass ball with no mistakes so those points #1 and #3 were probably very effective at closing the gap to the top teams. Every stadium in every major league around Europe has a smooth field of grass now, that's one of the reasons for having less and less surprises at the end of the year.
Stoke city too - had the narrowest field and used tall forwards combined with ex-Javelin thrower Rory Delap
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.
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.
> Sunderland played Coventry in a two-legged playoff semi-final, having won the first leg 2-1 in Coventry
Feel for Frank, but this wasn't the top clubs & best players playing in the Premier League.
It was a very high-profile example of exactly this type of shenanigans during a live game picked up by the biggest broadcaster in the country, which will have been watched by millions across the world. The claim was that this simply isn't allowed happen, and it literally happened. I don't even particularly like the English leagues, but this is a daft thing to brush off
> millions across the world
Debatable playoffs have the same reach as PL & CL matches between top clubs.
> daft
I don't doubt that the home team may make changes to their advantage, but I don't think the broadcasters would particularly like it if the pitch absolutely destroyed any chance at good entertainment. In International Cricket, the equivalent would be preparing the pitch to the home team's strengths (which went horribly wrong for India, the home team, in the 2023 World Cup Final, which was as drab as they come).
Consider the recent Club World Cup final and semi-finals, hosted on an American football field with shitty SIS pitch. I saw more slips from players in the semi-final than I've ever seen in a single game.
None of those field issues were due to home field gamesmanship though. That was shitty US planning and conversion of NFL stadiums with turf into temporary real grass fields. Comparing the two shows a total stretching of the storyline. Yes, the CWC fields were embarrassingly bad. Has nothing to do with TFA though
Are the world cup pitches going to be better?
doubtful, but maybe they can learn from this experience. it's managed by USSocer, so I don't have a lot of faith.
It’s surprising what range of pitch size and slope are allowed in professional football.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Relevant: a Red Sox fan goes to Wrigley Field and finds it better[0]. For my money: Fenway Park is a goddamn terrible place to watch a ballgame, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Parking sucks, traffic sucks, the seating is cramped, and the food is expensive, but it's idiosyncratic, weird, and not designed to create an experience to within an inch of its life. Love that ballpark, and I say that as a Guardians fan by birth.
https://www.overthemonster.com/2025/7/23/24472798/fenway-par...
A tall wall is nothing, there used to be a stadium with a hill in play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikin_Park#Tal's_Hill
Fortunately most of the top level teams stick to the same dimensions:
https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/
https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-...
I've noticed teams that are used to playing on larger fields often have more inaccurate crosses when they play on narrower fields. Probably due to muscle memory on where their targets should be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What's your intention, the best team should always win? You would ruin football, that's the magic of it.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think regular seasons are actually better mechanisms for discovering the best team because playoffs always suffer from low sample size. A bad 90 minutes is enough to ruin more than one playoff round in the NFL and probably enough to make the difference in the NBA as well. Playoffs are better optimized for drama.
How are you defining "best" here?
Best can be defined as the team that wins most often if a large number of matches are played (between the same two teams).
The winner of a tournament is by that definition the best, it is basically a tautology.
If I have a coin that shows tails 55% of the time, then there still is a 45% chance that heads wins.
If heads and tails play many games against each other, then the probability for tails to win the overall "tournament" goes to 1. But football is a sport of relatively few games in cup tournaments and low scores (this relatively high variance). This is very conducive to upsets even if we assume perfectly independent probabilities.
Compare to Basketball play offs, with best of 7 Series and on the order of 100 "goals" per game.
That's maybe why in football the league title is more prestigious than the cups, while in basketball the regular season is not considered anywhere near as important as the play offs.
> That's maybe why in football the league title is more prestigious than the cups
Tell that to supporters of Scottish Cup Winners 2024/25 Aberdeen FC (I am a supporter of Scottish Cup Winners 2024/25 Aberdeen FC) :D
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.
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_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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U (uncensored: https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/733659771889629... )
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.
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.
Mike Woodward - I'm looking forward to your AI Summary/Posting Bot post.
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.