Home Advantage In Sports Research Articles

Revising home advantage in sport – home advantage mediation (HAM) model

ABSTRACT The Home Advantage (HA) phenomenon, where teams perform better in front of their fans, has garnered increased interest during the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided a unique opportunity to study HA without crowd presence. Despite the presence of useful conceptual frameworks, most previous research has focused on investigating isolated individual factors. Here we review our newly developed Home Advantage Mediated (HAM) model, which considers all major factors and their interrelations simultaneously. HAM assumes that the crowd effects are mediated through other relevant factors, such as referee bias and team performance. Most importantly, HAM can be formally expressed as a mediation model, a technique widely employed in social sciences for investigating causal pathways. We demonstrate how researchers can use HAM to model the HA in European football and how moderating variables, such as COVID-19 and the absence of fans, can be incorporated into the model to disentangle the processes behind the HA phenomenon. This model not only sheds new light on this well-established sports phenomenon but also guides the practical application of mediation and moderated mediation models in a Bayesian framework. This approach can be extended to other sports science areas, demonstrating the versatility and utility of our model.

Home advantage and the influence of officiating decisions

Even after decades of research, it is largely unclear how the various factors that cause the home advantage act and interact with one another. This paper provides an updated narrative review of the home advantage in sports, with a particular interest in the impact of refereeing. We used multiple sources for data collection and limited our search to peer-reviewed journals. Detailed information was extracted and documented from each of the retrieved articles. Bibliometric data were also calculated and assessed to evaluate the evolution of research in this field. The findings of this review show that home advantage is elevated in certain type of sports and due to properties of the crowd. In particular, the social pressure of the home crowds has direct and indirect effects on both home advantage and referee bias. Studies on games played in empty stadiums provided significant evidence for a reduced referee bias, and a decline in athlete-related variables. Several potential directions for future research emerged from this review. More research on the home advantage in women's sports, in individual sports, and at lower levels of play is warranted. These efforts will contribute to further extend our understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.

Home Advantage in the top Czech Hockey League

Home advantage in sport has long been established as an important factor in determining the outcome of a match. According to this phenomenon, the home team should win more games and score more goals than the away team. Home advantage is a very complex phenomenon that is influenced by many different factors. One possible explanation is that the home crowd supports the home team's performance and also causes the referee to be under pressure and favor the home team. The aim of this paper is to quantify the home advantage in the Czech top hockey league. Using statistical analysis, the number of points scored, goals scored, shots taken, penalties awarded and penalty minutes in the 2019/20 season were compared. A total of 364 matches were analysed. The results showed the existence of a home advantage in the Czech top hockey league in the 2019/20 season. Implications for sport practice and possible directions for future research are discussed.

No crowd, no roar, no home advantage: evidence from ice hockey

ABSTRACT Research question The COVID-19 pandemic entailed a period where no spectators were allowed to attend arena events. This provided a unique opportunity to study how the non-presence of supportive home crowds affects home advantage in sports. In this paper, we examine if there is such a home advantage for ice hockey. Research methods Using data from four consecutive seasons of Norwegian ice hockey, we apply team-fixed and referee-fixed effects regression analysis to identify how the non-presence of home crowds affects two aspects of home advantage in ice hockey: goal scoring and number of suspensions. Results When matches are played in front of no home crowd, away teams score more goals to reduce the initial goal scoring difference in favor of home teams. When playing in front of no home crowd, home teams also get more suspensions causing more power plays for away teams to reduce the initial difference in number of suspensions favoring home teams. Finally, more suspensions for home teams are positively correlated with goal scoring for away teams. This suggests that the absence of home crowds also influences goal scoring indirectly for away teams, i.e. through more suspensions for home teams. Implications When two teams of equal performance-ability meet up, hockey team owners, coaches, people betting on hockey matches, and fans/spectators could all benefit from knowing that a roaring home crowd might be the critical issue that tips the scale in the home team’s favor.

Türkiye Erkekler Hentbol Süper Liginde Ev Sahibi Olma Avantajı

Sporda ev sahibi olma avantajı uzun süredir araştırılmaya devam eden önemli bir konu olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu araştırma, Türkiye Erkekler Hentbol Süper Liginin 2015/2016 ile 2019/2020 sezonları arasında oynanan beş sezon boyunca ev sahibi olma avantajının değerlendirilmesi amacıyla yapılmıştır. Araştırmada, ev sahibi takımların maç kazanma sayıları ve sezonlara göre ev sahibi olma avantajı gibi değişkenlerin analizi yapılmıştır. Elde edilen verilerin frekans ve yüzde değerleri alınmış, ev sahibi olma avantajı değerleri hesaplanmıştır. Türkiye Hentbol Süper Liginin incelenen beş sezonunda oynanan toplam 647 müsabakada, ev sahibi takımlar 325 galibiyet (%50,23) alırken, 269 maçtan mağlubiyetle (%41,57) ayrılmışlardır. Beş sezonluk zaman diliminde Hentbol Süper Liginde ev sahibi olma avantajı ise %53,46 olarak belirlenmiştir. Spor müsabakalarında önemli bir etken olduğu düşünülen ev sahibi olma avantajının, iyi kullanılmasının hentbol branşında da bir takımın başarısı için kayda değer bir faktör olduğu, yapılacak çalışmalarda bu durumun göz önünde bulundurulması gerektiği ve takımın başarısı üzerine önemli ölçüde etki edebileceği düşünülmektedir.

Home advantage in professional soccer and betting market efficiency: The role of spectator crowds

AbstractFan support has often been considered to be a main driver of the home advantage in sports. Using the “natural exper‐ iment” of ghost games during the COVID‐19 pandemic in German professional soccer and a dataset of 6,120 matches ranging over the seasons 2011/2012 to 2020/2021, we test this claim. Indeed, applying a difference‐in‐differences setup, we identify a reduction in the home performance ‐ though with much heterogeneity across leagues and teams. We, moreover, observe the home advantage to recover over time. In analysing whether betting markets anticipated this drop in the home advantage and its recovery, we test the efficient market hypothesis. In the short‐run, betting odds do not properly reflect the effect of ghost games regarding changes in the home advantage but they suitably account for it in the long‐run. Also, league heterogeneity is efficiently captured in the odds. Based on these findings, we show how simple, short‐run betting strategies could have exploited the discussed phenomenon. Our findings also have implications for agents' behavior on financial markets in the presence of unforeseen and unfamiliar shocks.

Home Advantage Perceptions in Elite Handball: A Comparison Among Fans, Athletes, Coaches, and Officials.

Home advantage in sports has been extensively researched in the academic literature over the past five decades. A review of the literature reveals several factors that consistently underly this phenomenon. One of the most documented is the home crowd effect. While the crowd effect on the results has been widely researched considering noise, size, and density, there are conflicting findings of the effect and its extent. Furthermore, the perceptions of fans, athletes, coaches, and officials of the causes of home advantage in general and the crowd effect in particular, remain marginal. This is especially important in the face of significant regulation changes in the stands caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study, therefore, examined the perceptions of fans, athletes, coaches, and officials of the Israeli handball premier league regarding fans’ contribution to the home advantage phenomenon along with other factors (e.g., travel and officiating). A questionnaire examining perceptions regarding home advantage was distributed to 232 Israeli participants (117 fans, 59 players, 26 coaches, and 30 officials). Results, based on MANOVA, ANOVA, and post-hoc analyses, indicated significant differences in participants’ perceptions of the different factors in general and the crowd factor in particular. Overall, the crowd was perceived as the most important factor contributing to the home advantage phenomenon (M = 5.7). Furthermore, fans perceived their contribution (i.e., the crowd) significantly higher than the rest of the participants (p = 0.001; i.e., players, coaches, and officials). On the other hand, officials ranked their contribution to the home advantage effect as low as well as significantly under ranked their contribution in comparison to the other groups (p < 0.001). This result suggests that officials perceive themselves as relatively robust to the crowd effect compared to the other participants. Additional results are discussed in light of existing gaps in the literature on the home advantage phenomenon. Alongside the theoretical contribution, these findings contribute to applied implications of increasing the home advantage effect when playing at home and negating the home advantage when playing away.

Effects of home advantage on set outcome and game actions performance in the Chinese Women’s Volleyball Association League

ABSTRACT Home advantage in sport is a widely analyzed phenomenon with an unclear impact on volleyball. The aim of this study was to explore the influence of match location on the set outcome and technical performance indicators in the Chinese Women’;s Volleyball Association League. A total of 656 sets (181 matches) were observed during two consecutive seasons (2016-2018). The point and error performances in actions when teams played at home and away in terms of each set were analyzed. Comparisons were made using T test or Mann Whitney-U test, with the SMD at 95% of interval confidence. Also, a discriminant analysis was applied (p < .05). The results showed that the highest winning probability was in the fourth (59.5%), fifth (58.6%), and first (55.2%) set by home teams. Significant differences between teams were only found in spike error and block point (first set), spike point and serve error (second set), and serve-reception error (third set). Finally, only the points in terminal actions (serve, spike and block), as well as the serve error, lead to a discriminant function in the second set. These findings address coaches to develop proper strategies when they compete at home or away in a regular league.

Comparison of Home Advantage in European Football Leagues

Home advantage in sports is important for coaches, players, fans, and commentators and has a key role in sports prediction models. This paper builds on results of recent research that—instead of points gained—used goals scored and goals conceded to describe home advantage. This offers more detailed look at this phenomenon. Presented description understands a home advantage in leagues as a random variable that can be described by a trinomial distribution. The paper uses this description to offer new ways of home advantage comparison—based on the Jeffrey divergence and the test for homogeneity—in different leagues. Next, a heuristic procedure—based on distances between probability descriptions of home advantage in leagues—is developed for identification of leagues with similar home advantage. Publicly available data are used for demonstration of presented procedures in 19 European football leagues between the 2007/2008 and 2016/2017 seasons, and for individual teams of one league in one season. Overall, the highest home advantage rate was identified in the highest Greek football league, and the lowest was identified in the fourth level English football league.

Eliminating Supportive Crowds Reduces Referee Bias

We use a series of historical natural experiments in association football to test whether social pressure from a home stadium crowd affected behaviour and outcomes. The standout effect of an empty stadium was that referees cautioned visiting players less often, by over a third of a yellow card per match or once for every twenty-two fouls committed. Stadium crowds caused referees to favour the home team in their decision making. Empty stadiums appear to have reduced the overall home advantage in the final outcomes of football matches, but we cannot statistically reject no effect. We compare our results to the well-studied effects of "Ghost Games'' played in European football and other professional sports because of Covid-19.

Thin Slices of Athletes' Nonverbal Behavior Give Away Game Location: Testing the Territoriality Hypothesis of the Home Game Advantage.

The present research investigated whether perceivers could detect who is playing at home or away in soccer matches based on thin slices of professional (Experiment 1) and amateur (Experiment 3) athletes' nonverbal behavior prior to the match and whether perceivers rated athletes playing at home relatively higher on behavioral dimensions (Experiments 2 and 3) linked to territoriality. In Experiment 1 ( N = 80), participants watched short videos depicting soccer players prior to a UEFA Champions League match and rated whether athletes were more likely to be playing at home or away. In Experiment 2 (two groups N = 102 and N = 101), perceivers rated these videos in terms of assertiveness, dominance, and aggression. In Experiment 3, we replicated the procedure of Experiments 1 and 2 with different stimulus material from amateur soccer ( N = 112). Participants could significantly differentiate between home playing and away playing athletes (Experiment 1: d = 0.44 and Experiment 3: d = 1.07). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that perceivers rated professional and amateur soccer players higher on assertiveness ( d = 0.34-0.63), dominance ( d = 0.20-0.55), and aggression ( d = 0.16-0.49) when playing at home compared to playing away. Findings are supportive of evolutionary accounts of nonverbal behavior, ecological approaches to person perception, and the thin slices of behavior hypothesis by demonstrating that humans change their nonverbal behavior depending on game location. We discuss the relevance of the present findings for the home advantage in sports.

Modelling home advantage in sport: A new approach

Home advantage (HA) is well documented in a wide range of team sports, and the numerous factors that may contribute to it necessitate robust multivariate modelling techniques in order to establish their independent effects. As performance measures such as goals scored by each team in a single sporting match are not independent, bivariate distributions are increasingly being used to model HA. An alternative method is proposed whereby repeated measures regression analysis using Generalised Estimating Equations is used to account for within-match correlation. Using European Europa League football as an example, repeated measures analysis is used to estimate HA and its variance in terms of the home/away ratio for goals scored, and a simple formula provided for expressing this in terms of the percentage of goals scored by home teams, with standard errors. Methods of estimating covariate adjusted HA at different levels of a predictor variable, such as crowd size, are also described. All STATA (2009) commands used to run the analyses are provided. Although the proposed modelling strategy is most appropriate for sports where match outcomes are determined by discreet events of equal value (e.g. goals scored in football), generalisations of this approach to continuous and binary measures of team performance are also described.

Home advantage and sports performance: evidence, causes and psychological implications

Home advantage in competitive sports is well documented despite some contradictory results. Previous studies have identified 5 main causes of home advantage in competitive sports: crowd, familiarity, travels, rules and territoriality. Moreover, several studies have proposed the influence of these factors over psychological and behavioral states in athletes, coaches and referees. The present review summarizes the available scientific evidences about home advantage in sport and tries to identify the environmental and psychological causes of this phenomenon.

The Impact of Crowd Noise on Officiating in Muay Thai: Achieving External Validity in an Experimental Setting

Numerous factors have been proposed to explain the home advantage in sport. Several authors have suggested that a partisan home crowd enhances home advantage and that this is at least in part a consequence of their influence on officiating. However, while experimental studies examining this phenomenon have high levels of internal validity (since only the “crowd noise” intervention is allowed to vary), they suffer from a lack of external validity, with decision-making in a laboratory setting typically bearing little resemblance to decision-making in live sports settings. Conversely, observational and quasi-experimental studies with high levels of external validity suffer from low levels of internal validity as countless factors besides crowd noise vary. The present study provides a unique opportunity to address these criticisms, by conducting a controlled experiment on the impact of crowd noise on officiating in a live tournament setting. Seventeen qualified judges officiated on thirty Thai boxing bouts in a live international tournament setting featuring “home” and “away” boxers. In each bout, judges were randomized into a “noise” (live sound) or “no crowd noise” (noise-canceling headphones and white noise) condition, resulting in 59 judgments in the “no crowd noise” and 61 in the “crowd noise” condition. The results provide the first experimental evidence of the impact of live crowd noise on officials in sport. A cross-classified statistical model indicated that crowd noise had a statistically significant impact, equating to just over half a point per bout (in the context of five round bouts with the “10-point must” scoring system shared with professional boxing). The practical significance of the findings, their implications for officiating and for the future conduct of crowd noise studies are discussed.

Within-season dismissal of football coaches: Statistical analysis of causes and consequences

The paper examines the triggers for, and, consequences of, within-season dismissals of managers (head coaches) in the top division of the Spanish Football League during seasons 2002–2003 to 2004–2005. A major reason for directors deciding on dismissal is shown to have been concern that the club in question was in danger of demotion out of the division. This suggests that the clubs hoped to bring about short-term improvement in performance by changing manager. Employing an ordered probit model of match results, we demonstrate that an improvement in results tended to be achieved but only in home matches. The finding vindicates the decisions taken by club directors who dismissed their managers and implies that appeasing fans can have on-the-field benefits. It is consistent with the importance attributed to crowd support in the literature on home advantage in sports.

The influence of crowd noise and experience upon refereeing decisions in football

Objective. The existence of the home advantage in sport is well known. There is growing evidence that crowd noise plays a crucial part in this phenomenon. Consequently, a quantitative study was undertaken to examine influence of crowd noise upon refereeing decisions in association football (soccer). The association between years of experience and any imbalance in refereeing decisions was also addressed. Methods. To investigate whether the presence or absence of crowd noise might influence qualified referees when assessing various tackles/challenges recorded on videotape. Binary logistic regression was used to assess the effect of crowd noise and years of experience on referees' decisions. Results. The presence of crowd noise had a dramatic effect on the decisions made by referees. Those viewing the challenges with background crowd noise were more uncertain in their decision making and awarded significantly fewer fouls (15.5%) against the home team, compared with those watching in silence. Conclusions. The noise of the crowd influenced referees' decisions to favour the home team. It is suggested that referees' decisions are influenced by the salient nature of crowd noise, the potential use of heuristic strategies, and the need to avoid potential crowd displeasure by making a decision in favour of the home team.

Home advantage in sport: an overview of studies on the advantage of playing at home.

This review identifies the most likely causes of home advantage. The results of previous studies have identified 4 factors thought to be responsible for the home advantage. These can be categorised under the general headings of crowd, learning, travel and rule factors. From the accumulated evidence, rule factors were found to play only a minor role (in a limited number of sports) in contributing to home advantage. Studies investigating the effect of learning factors found that little benefit was to be gained from being familiar with the local conditions when playing at home. There was evidence to suggest that travel factors were responsible for part of the home advantage, provided the journey involved crossing a number of time zones. However, since high levels of home advantage are observed within countries where travel distances are not great. travel factors were not thought to be a major cause of home advantage. The evidence from studies investigating crowd factors appeared to provide the most dominant causes of home advantage. A number of studies provide strong evidence that home advantage increases with crowd size, until the crowd reaches a certain size or consistency (a more balanced number of home and away supporters), after which a peak in home advantage is observed. Two possible mechanisms were proposed to explain these observations: either (i) the crowd is able to raise the performance of the home competitors relative to the away competitors; or (ii) the crowd is able to influence the officials to subconsciously favour the home team. The literature supports the latter to be the most important and dominant explanation. Clearly, it only takes 2 or 3 crucial decisions to go against the away team or in favour of the home team to give the side playing at home the 'edge'.