Home Advantage and its Influencing Factors in FIFA World Cup Asian Qualification

Abstract

To investigate home advantage in the FIFA World Cup Asian qualification, 508 matches in the group stage of World Cup qualifying in a total of five Asian Zone World Cup qualifying tournaments from 2006–2022 were analysed. It was found that home advantage exists in the Asian Zone World Cup qualifiers as a whole (59.9%), with home advantage at the regional level ranging from high to low in South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, East Asia and Central Asia; Turkmenistan is the country with the highest home advantage, reflecting its exceptional nature. At the individual match level, three factors of Country, Subregion and Year were adjusted by putting them into a multilevel model as random effects, meanwhile, a multi-level model with home points as the dependent variable and the rest as predictor variables also fit well ( R2 = .382). The results show that time zone and climate are significantly correlated with home points after controlling for team quality (both p < .05), i.e., travel and climate were key factors influencing the Asian Zone World Cup qualifiers. Altitude, referee bias, crowd and cultural dimensions were not significant influencing factors for home advantage. As cultural dimensions that significantly affect the home advantage in domestic leagues, corruption, ethnic fractionalisation and conflict did not have a significant impact on the home advantage of the Asian qualifiers, indicating that their roles may not be applicable to international competition settings, at least in the Asian qualifiers.