Do clubs playing at home win more?
Home field advantage is well-known to fans of different sports and is well-supported by the data. How prevalent is it in English football? That’s what I’m going to explore in this blog post.
A few years ago, I did a similar analysis, but with a much smaller data set (see https://blog.engora.com/2021/01/covid-and-soccer-home-team-advantage.html). This time, I have complete English football league data from 1888 to the 2024-2025 season, so my analysis is going to be much more thorough. Frankly, I was surprised by what I found.
What are the metrics?
The goal metric is simple, it’s just the mean over all the matches in a season of home goals – away goals. I’ll call it the per-match home goal advantage. A value of 0.25 would mean home clubs score 0.25 more goals per game than the away clubs over the course of a season. If there were no home advantage, we would expect the per-match home advantage to be 0.
What about winning games? Do home teams win more often? I chose a simple metric, which is the fraction of all wins which were home wins. I’ll call this the home win fraction. If there were no home field advantage, we would expect this number of to 0.5. If every win was at home, it would be 1 and if every win was away, it would be 0. Of course, there’s an argument that home advantage might lead to a club that would otherwise be defeated drawing. That’s true, but it’s a lot harder to quantify, so for now, I’ve gone with the simpler metric.
Do home clubs win more than away clubs?
Here’s the home win advantage for every season for every league. The chart is interactive; click on the legend to turn leagues on and off. I have a version of this chart that shows the standard deviation, but it’s not very helpful, so I haven’t shown it in this blog post.
The obvious feature is the downward trend in home advantage across all leagues. I have a lot more to say about that later.
A little less obvious is the COVID dip, shown below for the Premier League (you can see if for other leagues in the chart above by zooming in). What exactly happened during COVID is complex, but here’s a summary:
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