Download “Football Freakonomics”: How Advantageous Is Home

Is Home Field Advantage Real?
By:
Matt Soniak
As the World Series heads to Game Six tonight, the Red Sox are up three games to two. Boston
lost once at home in Fenway Park, and the St. Louis Cardinals got beat twice at their own Busch
Stadium. They’ve each won only one game at home. Both teams are missing out on that certain
something, that edge that seems to come from playing in your own stadium in front of the
hometown fans. Is that home field advantage real?
The science points to yes. Plenty of researchers have crunched the numbers on various sports and
found that the home team consistently wins a greater proportion of games. In a review of bunch
of these types of studies in 2010, Jeremy P. Jamieson, a psychologist at Northeastern University
in Boston, concluded that a home team will win approximately 60 percent of all games.
What contributes to this advantage? Researchers have found a number of things that give an edge
to the home team, some more obvious than others. Jamieson arranges them into a few categories.
The hometown crowd
Larger and denser crowds, which the home team would expect to have with their fans living
nearby, are associated with bigger advantages for the home team. The crowd’s behavior also has
an effect, and studies have found that when the fans boo the home team for poor plays, it acts as
a motivator for better performance—more so than when a visiting team is booed. Other research
suggests that noise from the crowd can influence the judgments of referees and umpires, and
fewer calls are made against the home team when the officials can hear the crowd than when the
fans are quiet.
The familiar field
Another factor is the players’ familiarity with their stadium’s facilities and the playing surface.
One study found that teams that relocate to a new stadium enjoy a reduced home field advantage
for a while. Even if it’s their stadium, the unfamiliarity takes away from their edge over away
teams until they get settled in to the new home.
Business travel
The third factor Jamieson found was travel. Away teams sometimes have to travel a long way to
their competitors’ home stadium, and studies have linked the away team’s travel distance to the
level of advantage that the home team has over the visitors. One of the main drivers behind this
effect was the jet lag from long-distance east-west travel affecting visiting teams’ performance
and game outcomes.
Positive thinking
Finally, these three factors all feed into a fourth: the psychological states of the players. Athletes
report feeling more positive and motivated when playing at home, which can affect their
performance.
In his review of the research, Jamieson found that baseball teams generally have a weaker home
field advantage than teams and competitors in other sports. Jamieson thinks that the one
underlying cause here is season length and game importance. Major League Baseball teams play
162 game in a regular season, so each individual game contributes less to their final win
percentage. If the players see an individual game as less important to the overall season, it might
reduce a home team’s motivation.
The crowd factor also seems to come into play here. In 2007, Jamieson writes, the average MLB
stadium had a capacity of 45,097 and average attendance for the season was 32,717. So, for an
average regular season game, about three quarters of the seats are filled. The English Premiere
football league (soccer, to us Yanks), in comparison, filled a little more than 80 percent of the
seats on average that same year, and showed a much larger home field advantage effect. A lower
crowd density might help explain why baseball shows less of a home field advantage effect than
more well-attended sports.
That said, NFL football has a shorter season than MLB baseball and denser crowds (around 98
percent of the seats were filled, on average, in 2007), but Jamieson found those teams had a
similar home field advantage to MLB, so something else has to be going on here to account for
the differences between sports. Jamieson suggests that fan behavior could contribute. While
soccer and football fans are known to be active and rowdy, baseball, he says, has a “less intense
atmosphere in which fans routinely leave even before the game is over.”
Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/article/53440/home-field-advantagereal#ixzz2lNZHgqZ2
“Football Freakonomics”: How
Advantageous Is Home-Field Advantage?
And Why?
Stephen J. Dubner
Do home teams really have an advantage?
Absolutely. In their book Scorecasting, Toby Moscowitz and Jon Wertheim helpfully compile
the percentage of home games won by teams in all the major sports. Some data sets go back
further than others (MLB figures are since 1903; NFL figures are “only” from 1966, and MLS
since 2002), but they are all large enough to be conclusive:
League
MLB
NHL
NFL
NBA
MLS



Home Games Won
53.9%
55.7%
57.3%
60.5%
69.1%
So it’s hard to argue against the home-field advantage. In fact
my Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt once wrote an
academic paper about the wisdom of betting (shh!) on home
underdogs (more here).
But why does that advantage exist? There are a lot of theories to
consider, including:
“Sleeping in your own bed” and “eating home cooking”
Better familiarity with the home field/court
Crowd support
Those all make sense, don’t they? In Scorecasting, Moscowitz and Wertheim compile data to test
a variety of popular theories. You might be surprised (and maybe even disappointed) to read
their conclusion:
When athletes are at home, they don’t seem to hit or pitch better in baseball … or pass better in
football. The crowd doesn’t appear to be helping the home team or harming the visitors. We
checked “the vicissitudes of travel” off the list. And although scheduling bias against the road
team explains some of the home-field advantage, particularly in college sports, it’s irrelevant in
many sports.
So if these popular explanations don’t have much explanatory power for home-field advantage,
what does?
In a word: the refs. Moscowitz and Wertheim found that home teams essentially get slightly
preferential treatment from the officials, whether it’s a called third strike in baseball or, in soccer,
a foul that results in a penalty kick. (It’s worth noting that a soccer referee has more latitude to
influence a game’s outcome than officials in other sports, which helps explain why the homefield advantage is greater in soccer, around the world, than in any other pro sport.)
Moscowitz and Wertheim also make clear, however, an important nuance: official bias is quite
likely involuntary.
What does this mean? It means that officials don’t consciously decide to give the home team an
advantage — but rather, being social creatures (and human beings) like the rest of us, they
assimilate the emotion of the home crowd and, once in a while, make a call that makes a whole
lot of close-by, noisy people very happy.
One of the most compelling (and cleverest) arguments in favor of this theory comes from a
research paper by Thomas Dohmen about home-field advantage in Germany’s Bundesliga, the
country’s top soccer league.
Dohmen found that home-field advantage was smaller in stadiums that happened to have a
running track surrounding the soccer pitch, and larger in stadiums without a track.
Why?
Apparently, when the crowd sits closer to the field, the officials are more susceptible to getting
caught up in the home-crowd emotion. Or, as Dohmen puts it:
The social atmosphere in the stadium leads referees into favoritism although being impartial is
optimal for them to maximize their re-appointment probability.
So it looks like crowd support does matter – but not in the way you might have thought. Keep
this in mind next time you’re shouting your brains out at a football game. Just make sure you
know who you’re supposed to be shouting at.