Home Field Advantage Calculation for Physical Education and Sport Students

Abstract

It is a well-established fact that playing at home field is an advantageous condition for professional sport teams. For this reason, the home field advantage in team sports is an important issue to be explored. It is also one of the different topics that physical education and sports students can use when they want to perform performance analysis on various sports branches in the future. The concept of home field advantage is determined by the ratio of the points the teams get from matches played at home field compared to the overall points obtained at the end of the season. Only when this advantage ratio is over 50% can we talk about such a benefit. The aim of this study is to show students how to calculate home field advantage in football in the physical education and sports departments in universities with Turkish Super League example. For this reason, 30 seasons and n = 18,052 matches from 1987 to 2017 were analyzed. Data were obtained from tff.org, Turkey Football Federation's official website. According to the results obtained, home-playing teams were found to score over 50% in the light of all seasons analyzed. In the study, the mean home team advantage was found to be 61.4 ± 2.95%. When the literature is examined, it presents similar results with this study. At the end of the study, it was also found that there are different variables by which both the home playing team and the visiting team are influenced when determining the home advantage.