The Science Behind Homecourt Advantage: Why Playing at Home Gives You an Edge

In most team sports, the home or hosting team is considered to have a significant advantage over the away or visiting team. Due to this, many important games (such as playoff or elimination matches) in many sports have special rules for determining what match is played where. In association football, matches with two legs, one game played in each team's "home", are common. It is also common to hold important games, such as the Super Bowl, at a neutral site in which the location is determined years in advance. In many team sports in North America (including baseball, basketball, and ice hockey), playoff series are often held with a nearly equal number of games at each team's site. However, as it is usually beneficial to have an odd number of matches in a series (to prevent ties), the final home game is often awarded to the team that had the most success over the regular season.

Homecourt Advantage

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An example is UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League home and away legs, with weaker teams often beating the favourites when playing at home. The World Cup victories of Uruguay (1930), Italy (1934), England (1966), Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and France (1998) are all in part attributed to the fact that the World Cup was held in the winner's country. A 2006 study by The Times found that in the English Premiership, a home team can be expected to score 37.29% more goals than the away team, though this changes depending on the quality of the teams involved. Others have suggested that the increase in British medals during the 2012 Olympics may have been impacted by home court advantage.[2] (However, having home court did not help Canada at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the only Summer Games at which the hosting country failed to win a single gold medal.)

The strength of the home advantage varies for different sports, regions, seasons, and divisions. For all sports, it seems to be strongest in the early period after the creation of a new league. The effect seems to have become somewhat weaker in some sports in recent decades.[3]

Adams & Kupper (1994) described home-field advantage as an expertise deficiency. They demonstrated that, in theory and in practice, home-field advantage decreases as superiority of performance increases. They also showed that home-field advantage is not applicable for no-hit major league baseball games for pitchers who either replicated performance by winning two or more no-hitters or amassed a large number of career wins. Their general finding was that home-field advantage is a metric for the inability to maintain performance independent of environment and that this metric is inversely related to variables of expertise.[clarification needed]

There are many causes that attribute to home advantage, such as crowd involvement, travel considerations, and environmental factors. The most commonly cited factors of home advantage are usually factors which are difficult to measure and so even their existence is debated. Most of these are psychological in nature: the home teams are familiar with the playing venue; they can lodge in their homes, rather than in a hotel, and so have less far to travel before the game; and they have the psychological support of the home fans.

Ryan Boyko, a research assistant in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, studied 5,000 English Premier League games from 1992 to 2006, to discern any officiating bias and the influence of home crowds. The data was published in the Journal of Sports Sciences and suggested that for every additional 10,000 people attending, home team advantage increased by 0.1 goals. Additionally, his study found that home teams are likely to be awarded more penalty kicks, and this is more likely with inexperienced referees.[4]

Sports Illustrated, in a 17 January 2011 article, reported that home crowds, rigor of travel for visiting teams, scheduling, and unique home field characteristics, were not factors in giving home teams an advantage. The journal concluded that it was favorable treatment by game officials and referees that conferred advantages on home teams. They stated that sports officials are unwittingly and psychologically influenced by home crowds and the influence is significant enough to affect the outcomes of sporting events in favor of the home team.[7]

Other research has found that crowd support, travel fatigue, geographical distance, pitch familiarity, and referee bias do not have a strong effect when each factor is considered alone suggesting that it is the combination of several different factors that creates the overall home advantage effect. An evolutionary psychology explanation for the home advantage effect refers to observed behavioral and physiological responses in animals when they are defending their home territory against intruders. This causes a rise in aggression and testosterone levels in the defenders. A similar effect has been observed in football with testosterone levels being significantly higher in home games than in away games. Goalkeepers, the last line of defense, have particularly strong testosterone changes when playing against a bitter rival as compared to a training season. How testosterone may influence results is unclear but may include cognitive effects such as motivation and physiological effects such as reaction time.[3]

An extreme example of home advantage was the 2013 Nigeria Premier League; each of the 20 teams lost at most 3 of 19 home matches and won at most 3 of 19 away matches. Paul Doyle ascribed this to visiting teams' facing "violent crowds, questionable refereeing and [...] [a]rriving just before kick-off after long road trips, often on hazardous surfaces".[8]

In a number of sports, the hosting team has the advantage of playing with their first choice uniforms, while the visiting team wears their alternative away/road colors. Some sports leagues simply state that the team wears its away uniforms only when its primary jerseys would clash with the colors of the home team, while other leagues mandate that visiting teams must always wear their away colors regardless. However, sometimes teams wear their alternative uniforms by choice. This is especially true in North American sports where generally one uniform is white or grey, and "Color vs. color" games (e.g., blue vs. red uniforms) are a rarity,[10] having been discouraged in the era of black-and-white television.[11] Many teams from warm-weather cities may wear their white uniforms at home, forcing their opponent to wear dark uniforms in the hot weather. An exception is a rule in high school American football (except Texas, which plays by NCAA football rules), requiring the home team to wear dark jerseys and the visiting team to wear white jerseys, which may work as a disadvantage to the home team in hot-weather games.

In ice hockey, there are at least three distinct rule-related advantages for the home team. The first is referred to as "last change", where during stoppages of play, the home team is allowed to make player substitutions after the visiting team does (unless the home team ices the puck, in which case no substitutions are allowed). This allows the home team to obtain favorable player matchups. This rule makes the home team designation important even in games played on neutral ice. Traditionally, the second advantage was that when lining up for the face-off, the away team's centre always had to place his stick on the ice before the centre of the home team. However, in both the NHL and international rule sets, this now applies only for face-offs at the centre-ice spot; when a face-off takes place anywhere else on the ice, the defending centre has to place his stick first. The centre who is allowed to place his stick last gains the ability to time the face-off better and gives him greater odds of winning it. The third advantage is that the home team has the benefit of choosing whether to take the first or second attempt in a shootout.

Comparison of home advantage in 19 European football leagues between the 2007/2008 and 2016/2017 seasons was made in Marek and Vávra (2020).[14] They found that, among the analysed leagues, the Super League Greece had the strongest home advantage and English Football League Two had the lowest home advantage.

During the regular season for a sport, in the interest of fairness, schedulers try to ensure that each team plays an equal number of home and away games. Thus, having home-field advantage for any particular regular-season game is largely due to random chance. (This is only true for fully organized leagues with structured schedules; for a counterexample, college football schedules often have an imbalance in which the most successful and largest teams can negotiate more home appearances than mid-majors, a situation that was also prevalent in the early, disorganized years of the National Football League.)

However, in the playoffs, home advantage is usually given to the team with the higher seed (which may or may not have the better record), as is case in the NFL, MLB, and Stanley Cup playoffs. One exception to this was MLB's World Series, which from 2003 to 2016, awarded home-field advantage to the team representing the league which won the All-Star Game that year, to help raise interest in the All-Star Game after a tie in 2002; before 2003, home-field advantage alternated each year between the National League and the American League. Starting in 2017, home-field advantage in the World Series is nowadays given to the team with the best regular season record. Home-ice advantage in the Stanley Cup Finals is given to the team with the best season record. The NBA is the only league that has home-court advantage based solely on which team has the best record (using various tiebreakers to settle the question should the teams finish with identical records).

Rugby union's European Rugby Champions Cup also uses a seeding system to determine home advantage in the quarterfinals (though not in the semifinals, where the nominal "home" teams[19] are determined by a blind draw). 2ff7e9595c