Topic: [Discussion] There is more to Home Advantage than just Fans (Read 448 times)

They feel that they must perform well in front of home fans which will give more tension. I can say that because I have a friend who is a local player who tells me if he plays in front of the home fans, it is tough for him and his team because if they don't give the best performance and they cannot win the games, many people will say a bad thing. Some of those people cannot accept if they lose, and still judge them that they are not practising with hard. That can make my friend and his team feel down and sad because the people don't know how hard to compete with the opponent.

About football pitch size, it's not only about the inside but also about the outer part. Let's take a look about this famous Bale's goal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWVrolNQ4RU he ran a few meters outside the line.

Also,

https://www.football-stadiums.co.uk/articles/are-all-football-pitches-the-same-size/

Of course, there's a home advantage. Aside from fans who can boost the player's energy, I think one advantage is that players feel more comfortable playing because they were used to play in that place. And they don't have to adjust to the environment at all. The time for traveling, they can use it to practice more. But it's not only about home advantage. Even if the players had the advantage, if they don't do well in the game, it's still worthless. The winner will still depend on their performance during the game.

It's more fun to play in your place but players should not just base on that. Because wherever they will be playing, they should condition their bodies and mind. I have also seen a lot of games that visitors still win the game, and it's because of their performance.

I was a little confused. You are saying that playing in front of home fans is advantageous and then turned around saying it is also disadvantageous. I guess the motivation to win in front of your own home fans and not let them down is enough to get rid of all the tension and stress. More than stress and tension, playing at home and in front of your very own top cheerers will probably make you more relaxed and comfortable. You are on your comfort zone, after all.

The home advantage for me can give additional support for the team because with the audience watch the match, each player will have more motivated to win, and they will try so hard to win. But besides the advantage, there will be a disadvantage which is each player sued to play maximally. And there are high tension and stress among the player. And if each player doesn't have a strong mind and heart, they will not perform well.

But yes, the advantage will give benefit to the team because they will have more chance to win in front of their supporters. The opponent cannot show their best playing when the supporters are too big, and sometimes the opponent will down for their mental. At this moment, we know that every sport has been postponed or reschedule due to Coronavirus. And we know that some players got infected by the virus, so that does homework for each sports organization to solve and cure the player. Their health is an important and urgent thing.

I think you are right, for different football clubsides in europe. They have this massive advantage when they are playing at home.
And for some reasons it is because of the field width, the supporters and the confidence to play at home.

If you use Liverpool as a use case, they believe in Anfield because the club supporters makes it a cult during champions league nights.
If you take Manchester United as a use case, they are the only team in the EPL never to lose a home match after scoring 2 goals before half time.

Stats also do help players believe that they are unbeatable on the grounds.

Some clubs in central europe play on artifical grass, too. Red Bull Salzburg eg. comes to my mind. I know that there were lots of discussions when they started to use artifical grass because foreign teams had a huge disadvantage if those teams weren't used to that sort of pitch. So artifical vs. natural grass is definitely a thing when it comes to "home ground advantages"

As I remember, Young Boys and Astana playing UEFA Champions/Europa league games, some national teams like Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Andorra, Faroe Islands play on artificial grass.
It's big advantage for home team, but actually, most players of home team would prefer to play on natural grass, they don't like plastic pitches, mainly because risk of injury is bigger. From my little experience playing on artificial pitch, it's terrible to play on it when it's hot. If air temperature is 25°C, it feels like over 40°C. And when pitch is frozen, it becomes very dangerous to play.
But UEFA allow such pitches, because not every club/national team can have natural pitch because of severe air conditions or financial reasons.

Well, this is something I now disagree with in regards to the topic of this thread

In tennis there is no home advantage apart from the fans when you play in your home country. Even when playing in your country, you most likely have to go all through the stress that comes with NOT being at home with your regular routines. You have the same hassle with getting/flying there, you will live in a hotel etc. as all the other players. It's just the fans - and in this topic it's about additional factors of home advantage.

And for sure, there are players that perform better on hard/clay/grass, but this is not about home advantage - it's just the surface they prefer playing on. You could argue that a lot of european outdoor tournaments are being held on clay and since most european players naturally grow up on clay, this is sort of home advantage then. US players mainly perform poor on clay, because they grow up playing on hardcourts and thus nearly all US tournaments are played on HC. Same for british players and their grass courts. But then again, not all hardcourts are the same and not all clay courts are the same. Even the balls are different, which is something the players always notice (and which amazes me ).

In tennis, you often have players, that do very well in a particular tournament though, that isn't necessarily in their home country. Carlos Moya comes to my mind, who "always" won the ATP event in Umag. Or Alison Riske is always playing Top3 tennis in Shenzhen. These athletes somehow feel at home at these tournament.

I partially disagree with you here. Lets take Tennis for example. Some players are better on clay courts when compared to other players who are better on grass courts and that is a proven fact. However, all sports are not the same.

Home ground itself helps home teams in sports like Cricket, Tennis etc while it doesn't make a big difference(Small difference though) in some sports like NBA etc though.

This article gives reasons why the referee may be influenced. In my opinion, one of the main reasons is surely the audience. In the home stadium you automatically have 20k + people, who may not make your decisions and let you feel that with interjections and insults. The younger and unexperienced the referee is the more likely it is that he will not make any decisions that the home audience would not like.
The article further states that in stadiums with no running track between the audience and the pitch (like in Old Trafford) it is way more likely that the referee favours the home team. Very interesting stuff in my opinion and should definitly be considered in sports betting
 

It's actually not the only issue with the Schwarzwaldstadion in Freiburg Their pitch is officially too short for the official Bundesliga rules. It's 4.5 meters short - needs to be at least 105 meters, but theirs is only 100.5 meters. They play with a special permit for years already. But they are building a new stadium right now, which is ready for next season and everything will be fine there

Out of curiosity I have looked for the different pitch sizes and found some information here:


Yes, good point. While the teams in Lithuania probably are used to change between artificial/natural grass by now, I remember some discussions regarding the Europa League, when teams that always play on natural grass had to go for an away game and play on artificial turf there. If I am not mistaken, there are some teams from Switzerland and Norway that play on artificial turf and were participants in Europa League in the past.

Since most sports events is postponed, now we have time for this interesting discussion.
When we talk about home court advantage, first thing which comes to my mind is support of local fans. But there is much more things which are ore or less important. In away games players are travelling by planes and buses, they spend time on airports and traffic jams. Offcourse it doesn't help to get rest and prepare for the game. On international games, time zone difference is also a factor.
While home team have advantages - players sleep in their own bed instead of hotel, eat common food, arrive to stadium like every day. They have common suroundings, same dressing room. In basketball even basket rims are different in every arena - it's big factor.
In football, quality of pitch is another factor. Maybe it's less common in top leagues when we almost all teams have top notch pitches, it's more about lower divisions and less popular leagues, when sometimes away team arrive to play in potato field. In some leagues, like in my country, several teams play on artificial turfs - it's huge advantage against teams which play and prepare for the game on natural grass. And vice versa.
On the other, home court isn't always is advantage, because players get additional pressure and players sometimes fail to handle it. First example which homes to my mind is Brazil football team in World Cup 2014. But it's not that frequent cases - there is not so many teams which play better away than at home.
I knew that pitches have different sizes, but didn't knew that such big difference is allowed. But I may be wrong, but at least in biggest leagues sizes of pitches are pretty much similar size and few meters difference isn't very big factor. Now I can't find all these dimensions compiled into single place and I'm lazy to check wiki page of every stadium.
It's interesting thing about Freiburg pitch, for me it's strange that's allowed on such big level competition.

Actually, it's not true, in Maltese Premier League there is 3 stadiums is used https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_Premier_League
But probably this fact doesn't makes big difference.

I think home field advantage is not that big factor in NHL (in NBA too) because of long regular season. Cost of loss isn't that big there, so this is why we see these upsets so often. Things usually change when playoffs begin.

One sport where home field advantage is not such a big factor is ice hockey. But even here there is a different between European ice hockey and the NHL. In the NHL it happens quite often that the better team losses at home against a team who is the underdog. But NHL teams travel a lot and play 3-4 matches a week. This fatigue can also be the reason why such things happen. I like the changes that NHL made for this season. The teams now play a few successive matches at home and than they go for a little away tour. Once this away tour ends and they play in from of their home fans again, surprises happen (yes I am looking at you Colorado).     

Interesting, thanks. Refs are also always a little biased towards the bigger, more well-known players/teams (without me having any data to back that up). Like for example, if Ronaldo gets tackled, the ref is more likely to blow the whistle, than when a 19-year old scrub gets tackled. As for the article mentioned above, now that I think of it, it definitely makes sense. I guess this is especially valid for possibly game-changing incidents like penalties, free-kicks near the box, handball etc. When 50,000 people scream "hand", the ref might be urged more to give a penalty for example. But with the introduction of VAR, this maybe does not have such a big impact anymore, since everything is reviewed.

I would also claim, that a ref is more likely to give a foul, when the fouled player is screaming loud and doing some Hollywood afterwards - even if there was no foul at all. Would be interested in some analysis about that

True that. In fact, the factor of home advantage is very well researched. There are lots of statistics, papers and articles out there which deal with the home advantage and how it has to be considered for outcomes of games, eg. in sports betting.

I found two very interesting articles which I want you to show. The first one is a record accross 64 soccer leagues and 80k matches. The record orders different soccer leagues by the influence of home advantage on the games played. The most interesting fact is the last record set, its the Maltese Premier League:



As you can see the factor is 1, meaning home advantage doesn't have any influence on any game. Why is that? The Maltese Premier League is a very small league, all games are played in the same stadium, so there is no "home team" at all.

The second article lists a lot of factors which influence home advantage. According to this article the so called "Referee Bias" is the most influental factor on home team advantage:

That is definitely true. Playing in front of your home crowd puts some additional pressure on you, but this is clearly outweighed by all the positive aspects home advantage brings.
I remember tennis player Samantha Stosur, who was Top10 player for several years. Now in tennis, there is not that much of an home advantage, since a lot of advantages don't apply here (it's really mostly the fans), but Stosur was always a nerve wreck when playing at her home Grand Slam in Melbourne. She just couldn't handle the pressure with all the Aussies expecting her to go deep and/or even win the tournament.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Stosur

She also did pretty poor at Wimbledon, which is a surprise regarding her playing style and Aussies normally doing very well on grass, but this is another story.


You can't deny the fact, that there is the factor home advantage. Just look at the records for Football, Handball, Basketball, Icehockey etc teams. 95% of them do better at home than they do in away games. When Liverpool plays ManCity at home, they definitely have higher chances of winning than playing @ManCity.

But I guess there are times that it would put a lot of pressure to the players because they know that there are so many people out there who expects them to win.
To be honest I don't really believe in home advantage it all goes down to the skills,physical and mental health of the players.

It is a matter of the game if the factor of the home ground itself matters at all. I am sure it does for games like cricket, but I am definitely sure the effect of knowing the ground better than the opposing team is negligible for games like soccer, basketball, tennis and so on. The ground itself usually doesn't have a big influence on this games itself - at least not the fact that one teams knows it better than the other.

In football (soccer, not NFL), the football pitches have different sizes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/rules_and_equipment/4200666.stm

I know that the home team does not always use the home stadium as their training ground; however, they play half of their league matches on it. They will get used to the size, the grass, the atmosphere, etc. These familiarities will help them perform better. When a team used to play on the wide pitch, they will find it more difficult to do the long ball on the narrow pitch, and vice versa.