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Home Advantage - sport

There seems to be several possible reasons why home advantage occurs.

Audience characteristics

The main suggestion as to why the home advantage occurs is due to the effects of a supportive home audience; the greater the noise, the greater the impression of support. Therefore, generally the home team will have greater support boosting their performance and possibly putting off the away team.

The number of people actually in the stadium will also have an effect.

There is a positive Correlation between crowd density (the number of home fans present related to the size of the stadium) and team performance.
In addition, a hostile home crowd can have a negative effect on the visiting
team and therefore indirectly give the home team an advantage.

Non-audience characteristics

It is also possible that non-audience effects influence the home field
advantage.

• The home team will generally engage in more assertive play and the away team more aggressive play.

• The home team’s familiarity with the stadium should ensure that their performance is optimised.

• The home team does not have to travel to the fixture, thus ensuring that the team members are not tired and therefore more able to perform to the best of their ability.

It is important to appreciate that it is likely to be a combination of factors that lead to the home advantage and obviously it is very difficult to study them in isolation.

Arguably, the greatest influence is the effect of the audience, although this would not be appropriate for all sports and is most relevant to sports that have reactive or interactive audiences.

Bray (1999) aimed to examine the home versus away records of individual teams in order to more fully describe team performance outcomes in relation to game location.

A total of 20 seasons (1974/5 to 1993/4) of National Hockey League (NHL) team results were compiled, providing more than 30 000 games for analysis.

In previous research, home advantage has been calculated as home winning percentage (HWP), the Average of the ratio of home games won to the number of home games played. This however, does not look at the individual team’s performance.

This study used an alternative measure of home advantage, home winning percentage minus away winning percentage. Therefore, in each year a team could either have a home advantage, a home disadvantage or no effect. The sample was categorised into three groups; high quality (66 teams), Average (273 teams) and low quality (70 teams)

The major finding was that the majority of teams in the NHL won a greater percentage of their home games than their away games. The teams won an Average of 17.3 per cent more games at home than away. There was no difference in the home advantage between the different classifications of team (high quality, average, low quality).

The team with the greatest home advantage actually won 52.5 per cent more of their games at home than away.

This study demonstrates the importance of the home environment for sports teams and indicates that it is strongly linked to winning.