Everyone has heard of the home advantage.
A game played away from home is thought to be a tougher prospect than the same game played at your own ground. It’s something we learn early on as football fans and we willingly accept it as the truth – but is the home advantage real or a myth?
There have been plenty of studies looking into this idea, and not just from within football, so we have a lot of data and statistical evidence to go off here.
I can tell you right away that yes, home advantage is real, although whether a home crowd can help their team win or not is more debateable. It’s not just true of football either. Every team sport has recorded evidence of a home team advantage, from the NFL to Cricket.
What’s more interesting is why this happens in the first place, what aspects of the game are a factor, and how the home advantage has changed over time.
These are the things I will be exploring here.
Why Does it Exist?
Pinning down the home advantage to constituent parts is impossible.
You would need to study a huge number of controlled games, adding in and taking away various elements to measure their impact. Even if this was possible, the number of other variables such as individual player form, weather, time of day etc would skew the data.
So we don’t know the exact science behind why this phenomenon occurs, but we can make some fairly educated suggestions.
- Crowd influence – Home games mean a much larger and more vocal support base. I’ll cover this in more detail shortly.
- Familiarity – Home teams know the pitch, their tactics are designed for their ground and there is no disorientation.
- Travel fatigue – Staying the night in a hotel, long coach journeys the day before, being away from family. All these things can have a negative impact on travelling players.
The familiarity aspect is arguably the biggest factor.
Every pitch is different. There might be tighter edges, a funny way the sun shines in when playing up field at 4pm in Summer, the type of grass, the dimensions, stands closer or further from the pitch, etc.
A great example of this is when West Ham left Upton Park for the London Stadium in 2016. Here are some stats for their final season at Upton Park (a notoriously difficult place to play for visiting teams) vs their first at the London Stadium:
| Season | Home Wins | Home Draws | Home Losses | Home Goals Scored | Home Goals Conceded | Points Won at Home |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upton Park (2015-16) | 9 | 7 | 3 | 34 | 26 | 34 |
| London Stadium (2016-17) | 7 | 4 | 8 | 19 | 31 | 25 |
The two stadiums were completely different, and it took time for the club to acclimatise. A few seasons later they had their home advantage back, but it took time to get there.
In terms of travel fatigue, a 2021 study which analysed League 1 and League 2 teams found that clubs playing two away games within five days lost approximately 12% more of their games compared to their usual away record.
There are limits to this of course.
If Tottenham Hotspur visit Curzon Ashton FC at the Tameside Stadium with a full strength squad, no amount of cheering from the Ashtonians is going to put Spurs at a disadvantage. However, when it comes to teams of a similar quality, the stats bare out the idea of the home advantage.
Statistical Reality
If you are still dubious about the power of playing at home, take a look at these stats.
Between 2013 and 2023, Premier League teams won 45%-47% of their home games, compared with 28%-30% of games won by the away team. The variation is present because the data is taken from 10 seasons, and obviously the remainder of games will have been draws.
These figures are for the league as a whole rather for each individual team, so Manchester City will be winning more of their away games and Sheffield United will be losing more of their home games, for example, but the averages tell the story.
The average is a little lower for teams in the Championship and Leagues 1 and 2, but the absence of truly dominant clubs like City, Liverpool etc., explains the slight drop.
It’s similar if we look at goals scored. Home teams tend to score about 1.5-1.7 goals per game compared to 1.2-1.3 goals per game for away teams.
You can’t argue with maths, and the numbers prove the theory.
Can the Fans Make a Difference?
We are sometimes called the 12th man, and you know what? I think we deserve it.
You might have heard of Borussia Dortmund’s Yellow Wall, which must be an intimidating site, and can you imagine facing down tens of thousands of Liverpool fans at Anfield, bellowing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ from the Kop? That’s bound to have an impact, right?
When COVID struck and games had to be held behind closed doors, it presented a once in a lifetime opportunity to study the impact of fans at the stadium, because there weren’t any.
We could look at the average number of games won away from home until that point, and compare it with the number of games won away from home during lockdown. It’s true that the sample sizes were hugely unbalanced (35,000 games to 1,000), but they were still able to tell us something.
What they told us, was that teams playing away from home were 7% more likely to win during lockdown than they were before lockdown, on average. The only factor that had changed was the absence of fans. Interestingly, the lower down the leagues you went, the greater the impact the fans seemed to have.
Now, the people who ran the research say that is statistically insignificant because it falls within the usual variations seen from season to season. I’m not so sure, though.
That’s 1.33 away games per season. In a league like the Premier League where relegation or survival is often down to a handful of points, those kinds of numbers matter. Ok, it might not have anything to do with the crowd, but it might. That 7% may fall within usual variations, but the direction it varied in is significant, isn’t it?
Plus, if you are a supporter of a lower league team the evidence seems to suggest your impact is bigger than supporters of big teams. So League 1 and 2 fans really are a 12th man.
Home Advantage on the Decline
Having said all of this, the home advantage is on the decline and it has been for some time.
If we go right back to the early 1900s the home advantage was much more pronounced – something like a 60% average win rate for the home team. These were very different times of course. Travel was more difficult so fans couldn’t go too far, it took longer so the journey was more exhausting for travelling players, it was very difficult to get info on the opposing team or their ground, etc. The game was completely different too.
If we go back to the beginning of the Premier League era though, we still see a steady decline.
Here is the home win rate for the Premier League every ten years or so since it started. I have included the most current completed season as well as the season where stadiums were locked down due to COVID:
| Season | Home Win Rate (%) |
|---|---|
| 1992-1993 (Inaugural Premier League season) | 49.4% |
| 2000-2001 season | 47.8% |
| 2010-2011 season | 47.4% |
| 2019-2020 season | 45.2% |
| 2020-2021 season (COVID-19, no fans) | 37.9% |
| 2023-2024 season | 45.0% |
So it started with around a 50% win rate for home teams on average, and has dropped 5% since then in a slow but steady fashion. It was actually down to 44.2% in the 2022/23 season, so there are ups and downs, but on the whole the trend has been down.
This can arguably be put down to the developments in sports science data, improved travel conditions, the way team meetings and tactics have changed over time to include in depth analysis and things like that. It all chips away at the home advantage allowing visiting teams, especially those who are most dominant in the league, to perform better on unfamiliar soil.