Vanishing home field advantage in English football

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: 

• 2019-2020: matches were played behind closed doors (i.e., no fans in the stadium) after 13 March 2020. This is a good way into the season so the effect of no fans on the season will be muted.
• 2020-2021: most matches played behind closed doors. In essence, the entire season was affected.

In the lower leagues (tiers 3, 4, and 5), the 2019-2020 season stopped on 13th March 2020 and wasn’t resumed, outstanding matches were canceled.

Look at what happened during COVID: the home field advantage completely disappeared. That's so significant, I'm going to repeat it: during the 2020-2021 season, matches were played without spectators and during this season, and only this season, there was no home field advantage.

How big is the home field advantage?

Here’s the home goal advantage for all seasons for all leagues. The chart is interactive; click on the legend to turn leagues on and off. 

Once again, the decline in home field advantage is obvious, as its disappearance during the COVID season. Remember, the COVID season was played without spectators.

In 2025, the home advantage is about 0.25 goals.

What does this mean?

I’m going to repeat some of the analysis Sean Elvidge has done in his blog post (https://seanelvidge.com/articles/2025/Home_advantage_in_English_football/). 

Researchers have theorized that home advantage is caused by a number of factors:

• Home supporters cheering the club on.
• No travel for the home club.
• Familiar surroundings.

The elimination of home advantage during COVID is striking. Given that the “only” COVID difference is the absence of supporters, it seems likely that home advantage is due entirely or mostly from home supporters.

If home support is an important factor in helping teams win, then maintaining home supporters is important for clubs. To put it bluntly, it’s not enough to have TV money, you need people to go to matches.

How can we explain the decline in home advantage? The decline has been strikingly steady post-World War II and is consistent across all leagues. 

Explanations like easier club travel really don’t work; is it really easier for a club to travel in England in 2025 compared to say 2005? League specific reasons don't work either and neither do "trickle down" explanations (e.g., something affected the Premier League first and then worked its way down to the lower leagues)..

Whatever explanations there are must explain the consistent downward trend post war, so it can’t be a sudden change like a rule change. Here are some candidate explanations and what we might have to do to investigate if they’re relevant.

• Player fitness and training. Elvidge talks about this and I agree that it’s a possible explanation. Player-level metrics might enable researchers to do this kind of analysis, but it’s likely this data will only be available for the top tiers and only relevantly recently. It’s unlikely to be available for free.
• Fans traveling more, so away teams get more support. If having your supporters cheer you on helps, then the more supporters that go to away games the better. To investigate this, we would need the fraction of home and away supporters for each match, along with the attendance figures. I’ve got attendance data, but not the home/away breakdown. (Bear in mind, clubs travel very differently from their fans so the dynamic is different).
• Tactical evolution. Elvidge mentions this, but I’m not sure I agree. This would require clubs to play differently playing at home compared to away. A possible metric might be home and away substitutions for clubs, but I’m struggling to think of other metrics.

My favorite explanation is traveling fans. If fans affect the result, it would explain COVID, and traveling fans would explain the decline over time (away fans supporting their team leads to reduced home advantage). This explanation might be the easiest to investigate if I had the data.

Given current trends, it seems likely that home advantage will continue to dwindle and may effectively disappear in the years to come.

Similar football posts you might like

• https://blog.engora.com/2025/07/g-o-l-goals-in-english-football.html - goals in football
• https://blog.engora.com/2025/06/english-football-data.html - draws in English football