Exploring Premier League Clubs Performance and Home-Away Differences Based on Passing Network Analysis

Abstract

Abstract Whereas many studies have investigated the home advantage in football, only few studies focused on different passing patterns of home and away teams. Therefore, the aim of this study was to use two holistic indicators of social network analysis to explore potential differences: transitivity and density. As these metrics are not born in sport science, a further contribution of this study was to evaluate if these can serve as performance indicators. Based on a sample of the complete 2017/18 Premier League season, this study shows that higher ranked teams show significantly higher values for density (Z = 12.00; p < .001; r = 0.795) and transitivity (Z = 7.08; p < .001; r = 0.469) with large effect sizes. The differences of the teams’ performances for home and away games were not pronounced, and only with a small effect size (density: Z = 5.20; p< .001; r=0.267; transitivity: Z = 1.73; p = 0.084; r=0.089). Overall, results contribute to the current knowledge base in two ways: First, we could show that density and transitivity are correlated with performance, which makes sense as they can be interpreted as a team’s coopration variability. Second, we could show that the degree of successful collaboration is not significantly higher for matches played at home.