Sunday, July 20, 2025

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.

\[home\ win\ fraction = \dfrac{count\ of\ home\ wins\ in\ a\ league\ and\ season}{count\ of\ all\ wins\ in\ a\ league\ and\ season}\]

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've updated this section based on some feedback and the fact I was never happy with the writing.)

There are two very striking facts about the decline in home field advantage:

It's consistent and persistent. The decline is happening at a steady rate and has been going on since WWII.
It's happening in all leagues.

These facts have some implications for causal factors:

It can't be a one-off change like a rule change.
It can't be something that "trickles down" from the top league.
It has to be something that's present over the whole time period.

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.
Referee bias.
No travel for the home club.
Familiar surroundings.
Tactics and training.

COVID knocks out some of these explanations. If travel and familiar surrounding were the causes, they would still be present during COVID and we would see no change in home advantage. The fact that home advantage disappeared suggests that these are not causes.

Travel as an explanation suffers from other problems too. Yes, team travel in 2025 is easier than in 1950, but it's hard to argue it's got easier since 2005 (say). Remember, England (not the UK as a whole, just England), is a small country. One way of testing if travel is an issue would be to see if there's a correlation with distance traveled.

Tactics and training is another problematic explanation. It would require teams to play differently home and away. While I can buy that happens some of the time, I can't buy that it happens all of the time. It's also hard to see how training would provide an advantage to the home team alone. There's a further problem with testing this explanation. I can't think of any easily available data set that would let you do it.

Referee bias is a plausible explanation, it's possible that the home crowd may intimidate referees into a home club bias. This would testable by examining the difference in home and away red and yellow cards. The problem here is the data set. I have some red and yellow card data, but not a full set. Red cards were introduced in England in 1976 (and went away for a while), but there should be enough data for an analysis (if you can get the data).

Because of COVID, we know supporters have an effect on team performance. Why might it be declining? My favored explanation is away supporters. If more away fans are traveling to matches, then the away team gets a lift too. Fan support has some issues as an explanation though. As I'll show later In another blog post), the growth in attendance is uneven, but the decrease in home advantage is consistent. There's also very little easily available data on away supporters attendance.

My favorite explanations are referee bias and away supporters, but the lack of data is a real challenge.

Where is home advantage going?

Given current trends, it seems likely that home advantage will continue to dwindle and may effectively disappear in the years to come. It'll be interesting to see where this goes over the next few seasons.

Engora Data Blog