Why is there a home advantage in soccer?

Published on 09 Jun 2022 | Last updated on 01 Jul 2026 | Reading time: 8 minutes

Playing at home is an advantage for professional soccer teams

When witnessing a football game, many times we have wondered why the teams that play at home are so superior. Scientists have called this superiority "the advantage of playing at home" (Bray, S.R., Obara, J., Kwan, M., 2005) and refer to the increase in performance when competing on local terrain both in sports individual, collective, as professionals or amateurs.

A first definition and approach to the concept were provided by Courneya, K.S., Carron, A.V. (1992) who pointed to this term as “the consistent finding that home teams win more than 50% of the games played on home turf under the home-and-away system”. Along these lines, the structure of the Professional Soccer leagues is organized in such a way that each team competes with its opponents the same number of times, which in our case is twice, one as a local team and the other as a visitor.

However, as Bray (1999) points out, "not all teams will reach these percentages above 50% since they will be affected by their level of ability about the rest of the participants in the competition".

In soccer, many studies have investigated this superiority from different perspectives. Thus, we find the works of Barnett and Hilditch (1993) in the Premier League that analyze the effects of familiarity with the field of play and its association with the advantage when competing at home. Bromn, Van Raalte, Brewer, Winter, and Cornelius (2002) study the relationship between the displacement of visiting teams and their impact on the result of the World Cup.

What factors affect the advantage of playing at home?

As we have previously pointed out, many studies have been carried out in football analyzing the advantage of teams playing at home, taking into account the possible factors that may have an impact on this superiority. From the study by Courneya and Carron (1992), they proposed some possible factors that directly influence the advantage of playing at home: displacements/trips, the familiarity with the environment, psychological aspects, rules/referees, and the amount of public.

Displacements/Trips

Many studies indicate that the greater the distance that the visiting team travels to play a game, the less chance they have of winning. They also point out that there are teams that are based in mountainous areas, while others are at sea level, so the routes of these trips tend to make the players not adapt to the weather conditions properly.

Familiarity with the environment

The playing environment could be critical for many professional soccer teams. This is because the players know exactly their field of play and, when playing an official match, they are used to any type of irregularity that the field may have.

Another point to note is that there are teams that play their home games on artificial grass, this gives them a tremendous advantage over their rivals that only play on this type of grass in recreational games.

We can also highlight the territoriality of the teams since total identification with the institution, city, province, or country they represent is a fundamental factor when playing a professional soccer game. This is what many soccer experts know as the "love of the shirt".

Psychological aspects

Many experts point out that pre-match anxiety is not a decisive aspect when playing at home, since anxiety is mainly related to the responsibility regarding the performance that the players want to have in each of the matches. But, also points out that team sports, such as soccer, present much less anxiety than individual sports.

Other studies indicate that the teams that play as visitors commit many more fouls than the local teams, this is due to the aggressiveness with which they arrive at the game and the effect generated by the fans from the stands.

Rules/Referees

One of the theories held by experts is that soccer players are likely to be psychologically affected by referees' decisions in different game situations. We expose this because historically, we have observed how the referees of the matches tend to be a little more rigorous with the visiting teams than with the local ones. The truth is that there is no real explanation for this behavior of the referees, but it greatly affects the mentality of the visiting players.

One of the causes of these arbitration decisions could be the effect of pressure that the local public may cause on them. Many studies indicate that the presence of a large public in a stadium and extreme noise directly affect the decisions made by the refereeing team.

In laboratory work, Nevill, Balmer, and Williams (2002) manipulated crowd noise to examine its effects on decisions made by referees. Two groups of referees were subjected to situations of noise or silence. Although all matches were judged by all referees, those who suffered from crowd noise conceded an average of 2.3 more fouls against the home team than those who did not witness any noise.

Number of public and Fans support

In football, several studies have analyzed the advantage of playing at home with the factor of public support.

Since it is known that the support of the public and the generation of more pressure on the referees are factors that increase the advantage of playing at home, it may be the explanation (along with the sense of territoriality) for the higher percentages of the teams in the home-court advantage.

The Pandemic and its influence on soccer matches

As we all know, the pandemic affected all companies in the world, whatever their nature.

Soccer did not escape it, with several months of suspension in all the leagues in the world to prevent the spread of the virus, the leagues had to make a very detrimental decision for them, economically speaking, to keep each of the teams and competitions. They decided that soccer leagues would resume and that they would be played without fans in the stands.

After this, and after analyzing what happened in German soccer in the 2019-2020 season, we have that the advantage of playing at home fell drastically for the first days without an audience in the Bundesliga. We now shed light on the sample-wide effects of 43 ghost match days under pandemic days. The figure below represents descriptive comparisons of the ratio of home wins to points for home teams before and during the virus.

Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Then, we can see in two graphs how the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 teams performed before and during the pandemic virus outbreak. The bold dotted line represents the Bundesliga, the gray dotted line represents Bundesliga 2, while the red dotted line represents the start of the pandemic.

We can also see how the effect of points won by games playing at home has been, as well as the games won.

Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com

As we can see, the lack of fans in the stands of soccer stadiums is directly related to the success of the local team. In the same way, this also depends on the quality of the teams that face each other, since, if we talk about Bayern Munich playing away against a team that is in the relegation zone, this concept would not apply in its entirety.

Similarly, if we move to the Spanish Football League or the French League, have the matches played at the Camp Nou, Santiago Bernabéu, and Parc des Princes, of FC Barcelona, ​​Real Madrid, and PSG, respectively, are practically a victory for the local teams.

An example of this is the home and away matches of the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League, in which the weaker teams, on many occasions, tend to beat the favorites when they play at home. We can also point to the World Cup victories of Uruguay (1930), Italy (1934), England (1966), Germany (1974), Argentina (1978), and France (1998) attributed in part to the fact that the World Cup was held in the country of the winner.

A 2006 study by The Times found that in the Premier League, a home team can be expected to score 37.29% more goals than the away team, although this changes depending on the quality of the teams involved.

In most team sports, the home or host team is considered to have a significant advantage over the visiting or visiting team. Because of this, many important games (such as playoffs or elimination matches) in many sports have special rules to determine which game is played where.

It is also common to hold major games, such as the Super Bowl, at a neutral site in which the location is determined years in advance.

For more detailed information, where you can learn about statistical data made by different experts related to one of the best soccer leagues in the world, the Bundesliga, before and during the pandemic, as well as learn a little more about the formulas that are used for the calculations, we invite you to access the following link.

So, does playing at home influence the outcome of the match?

The different investigations that currently exist show that the fact of playing at home is a relevant factor when it comes to achieving victory, as well as developing a better and more effective game at the team level.

While at the individual level, acting as a local influence a greater number of winning actions. It is important to note that, in some cases, playing at home can be counterproductive. These facts must be taken into account to be more effective when planning a match or a day of competition.

The results that came out of the matches without a home crowd in the stands between the two leagues (Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2) resulted in short-term inefficiencies in predicting home advantage.

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