Comparison of Home Advantage in European Football Leagues

Home advantage in sports is important for coaches, players, fans, and commentators and has a key role in sports prediction models. This paper builds on results of recent research that—instead of points gained—used goals scored and goals conceded to describe home advantage. This offers more detailed look at this phenomenon. Presented description understands a home advantage in leagues as a random variable that can be described by a trinomial distribution. The paper uses this description to offer new ways of home advantage comparison—based on the Jeffrey divergence and the test for homogeneity—in different leagues. Next, a heuristic procedure—based on distances between probability descriptions of home advantage in leagues—is developed for identification of leagues with similar home advantage. Publicly available data are used for demonstration of presented procedures in 19 European football leagues between the 2007/2008 and 2016/2017 seasons, and for individual teams of one league in one season. Overall, the highest home advantage rate was identified in the highest Greek football league, and the lowest was identified in the fourth level English football league.

Home team advantage in the English Premier League

The home team advantage in association football is a well known phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to offer a different view on the home team advantage. Usually, in association football, every two teams—team A and team B—play each other twice in a season. Once as a home team and once as a visiting, or away team. This gives us two results between teams A and B which are combined together to evaluate whether team A, against its opponent B, recorded a result at its home ground—in the comparison to the away ground—that is better, even, or worse. This leads to a random variable with three possible outcomes, i.e. with trinomial distribution. The combination and comparison of home and away results of the same two teams is the key to eliminate problems with different squad strengths of teams in a league. The bayesian approach is used to determine point and interval estimates of unknown parameters of the source trinomial distribution, i.e. the probability that the result at home will be better, even, or worse. Moreover, it is possible to test a hypothesis that the home team advantage for a selected team is statistically significant.