Home Advantage in Football: A Current Review of an Unsolved Puzzle
By Richard Pollard. 2008
240 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The existence of home advantage in football is a well known and well documented fact. However the precise causes and the way in which they affect performance are still not clear. A comprehensive review is made of published re- search under the main hypothesized explanations for home advantage in football which are: crowd effects, travel effects, familiarity, referee bias, territoriality, specific tactics, rule factors and psychological factors. Their interactions, and other factors that need to be taken into account when investigating home advantage, are considered. Home advantage in football has long been established as an important factor in determining the result of a game. Its existence is certain to affect the attitude of players, coaches, referees, fans and the media alike. Surprisingly, and despite over 25 years of research, the precise causes of home advan- tage and the way in which they operate are still not well un- derstood. A review of the evidence for and against plausible explanations needs to be set against a background of the fol- lowing basic facts. Home advantage has been in existence at least since the start of organized football at the end of the 19th century. It is a worldwide phenomenon, but varies con- siderably from country to country. It has declined in the ma- jor leagues in Europe over the last 15 years. It tends to be greater in football than in other team sports. The first report and quantitative description of home ad- vantage in football was by Morris in 1981 (1). This was soon followed by Dowie (2) and by Pollard (3) who gave a de- tailed quantitative description of home advantage in football and outlined the main hypothesized causes. This paper has been recently updated (4,5). These explanations are now examined in the context of a comprehensive review of pub- lished research on home advantage as it relates specifically to football. The scope of this paper does not allow a detailed critical review of each publication, but should facilitate a literature review for any future research study on a specific aspect of football's home advantage.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/139850269061a9492c701899b7c9902832d7405f
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Rutger Lit
- Carlos Lago
- L. Casáis
- Nuno Leite
- Miguel-Ángel Gómez
- Jaime Sampaio
- S. J. Koopman
- Richard Pollard
In Gender Studies
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The effects of situational variables on distance covered at various speeds in elite soccer (2010, background): “explanations are: crowd effects, travel effects, familiarity, referee bias, territoriality, specific tactics, rule factors, and psychological factors (Pollard, 2008).”
- Effects of starting score-line, game location, and quality of opposition in basketball quarter score (2010, background): “…are believed to be crowd effects, travel and learning/familiarity (see Carron, Loughead, & Bray, 2005; Nevill & Holder, 1999; Pollard & Pollard, 2005), and these will be operating together, each interacting with the other in ways difficult to investigate, isolate, and quantify (Pollard, 2008).”
- A dynamic bivariate Poisson model for analysing and forecasting match results in the English Premier League (2015, background): “An interesting discussion of what home ground advantage represents is given by Pollard (2008).”
- Components of home advantage in 157 national soccer leagues worldwide (2014, background): “Attempts to address this question have been made (Pollard, 2008b; Wolfson & Neave, 2004), but increased knowledge of the reasons for home advantage will doubtless produce more specific strategies.”