In , the term home advantage – also called home ground, home field, home-field advantage, home court, home-court advantage, defender's advantage or home-ice advantage – describes the benefit that the home team is said to gain over the visiting team. This benefit has been attributed to psychological effects supporting fans have on the competitors or referees; to psychological or physiological advantages of playing near home in familiar situations; to the disadvantages away teams suffer from changing time zones or climates, or from the rigors of travel; and in some sports, to specific rules that favor the home team directly or indirectly. In baseball and cricket in particular, the difference may also be the result of the home team having been assembled to take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of the home ballpark/Cricket ground, such as the distances to the outfield Outfield fence/boundaries; most other sports are played in standardized venues.
The term is also widely used in "best-of" (e.g., best-of-seven) as being given to the team that is scheduled to play one more game at home than their opponent if all necessary games are played.
In many sports, such designations may also apply to games played at a neutral site, as the rules of various sports make different provisions for home and visiting teams. In baseball, for instance, the visiting team always bats first in each inning. Therefore, one team must be chosen to be the "visitor" when games are played at neither team's home field. Likewise, there are uncommon instances in which a team playing a game at their home venue is officially the visiting team, and their opponent officially the home team, such as when a game originally scheduled to play at one venue must be postponed and is later resumed at the other team's venue.
Advantages
In most team sports, the home or hosting team is considered to have a significant advantage over the away or visiting team. Due to this, many important games (such as playoff or elimination matches) in many sports have special rules for determining what match is played where. In association football,
Two-legged tie, one game played in each team's "home", are common, with the team hosting the second leg having this home-field advantage. It is also common to hold important games, such as the
Super Bowl, at a neutral site in which the location is determined years in advance. In many team sports in
North America (including
baseball,
basketball, and
ice hockey), playoff series are often held with a nearly equal number of games at each team's site. However, as it is usually beneficial to have an odd number of matches in a series (to prevent ties), the final home game is often awarded to the team that had more success over the regular season.
An example is UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Europa Conference League home and away legs, with weaker teams often beating the favorites when playing at home. The World Cup victories of Uruguay (1930), Italy (1934), England (1966), Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and France (1998) are all in part attributed to the fact that the World Cup was held in the winner's country. A 2006 study by The Times found that in the Premier League, a home team can be expected to score 37.29% more goals than the away team, though this changes depending on the quality of the teams involved. Others have suggested that the increase in British medals during the 2012 Olympics may have been impacted by home court advantage.
The strength of the home advantage varies for different sports, regions, seasons, and divisions. For all sports, it seems to be strongest in the early period after the creation of a new league. The effect seems to have become somewhat weaker in some sports in recent decades.
Richard Adams and Susan Kupper described home-field advantage as an expertise deficiency. They demonstrated that, in theory and in practice, home-field advantage decreases as superiority of performance increases. They also showed that home-field advantage is not applicable for no-hit major league baseball games for pitchers who either replicated performance by winning two or more no-hitters or amassed a large number of career wins. Their general finding was that home-field advantage is a metric for the inability to maintain performance independent of environment and that this metric is inversely related to variables of expertise.
In recognition of the difficulty in winning away matches, cup competitions in association football often invoke the away goals rule. Away goals can also sometimes be used to separate teams level on points and goal difference in league competitions.
Causes
Factors related to the location and the venue
There are many causes that attribute to home advantage, such as crowd involvement (for instance a 2024 study
on ice hockey results during COVID-19, where no spectators were allowed at matches), travel considerations, and environmental factors. The most commonly cited factors of home advantage are usually factors which are difficult to measure and so even their existence is debated. Most of these are psychological in nature: the home teams are familiar with the playing venue, they can stay in their homes rather than a hotel, they don’t have to travel as far before the game, and they have the psychological support of the home fans.
Other factors, however, are easier to detect and can have noticeable effects on the outcome of the game. In American football, for instance, the crowd often makes as much noise as it can when the visiting team is about to run a play. That can make it very difficult for the visiting team's quarterback to call audible play changes, or for any player to hear the snap count. In contrast, the crowd is often quiet while the home team is on offense, and that enables the quarterback to use the hard count intended to draw the defense offsides as the defense can hear the hard count. In basketball, when a visiting player is making a free throw, home fans behind the backboard typically wave their arms or other objects in an attempt to break the visiting player's focus on making the shot. Environmental factors such as weather and altitude are easy to measure, yet their effects are debatable. Both teams have to play in the same conditions, but the home team may be more acclimated to local conditions with difficult environments, including extreme temperatures and high altitude (such as the case of Denver teams, as well as the Mexico national football team, many of whose home matches are played in Mexico City).
The stadium or arena will typically be filled with home supporters, who are sometimes described as being as valuable as an extra player for the home team. The home fans can sometimes create a psychological lift by cheering loudly for their team when good things happen in the game. The home crowd can also intimidate visiting players by booing, whistling, or Heckler. Generally the home fans vastly outnumber the visiting team's supporters. While some visiting fans may travel to attend the game, home team fans will generally have better access to tickets and easier transport to the event, thus in most cases they outnumber the visitors' fans (although in local derby and crosstown rivalries this may not always be the case). In some sports, such as association football, sections of the stadium will be reserved for supporters of one team or the other (to prevent fan violence) but the home team's fans will have the bulk of the seating available to them. In addition, stadium/arena light shows, sound effects, fireworks, cheerleaders, and other means to enliven the crowd will be in support of the home team. Sports announcer in many sports will emphasize the home team's goals and lineup to excite the crowd.
Ryan Boyko, a research assistant in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, studied 5,000 Premier League games from 1992 to 2006, to discern any officiating bias and the influence of home crowds. The data was published in the Journal of Sports Sciences and suggested that for every additional 10,000 people attending, home team advantage increased by 0.1 goals. Additionally, his study found that home teams are likely to be awarded more penalty kicks, and this is more likely with inexperienced referees.
Further, home players can be accustomed to peculiar environmental conditions of their home area. The city of Denver, being above sea level, has thinner air, enough so that it affects the stamina of athletes whose bodies are not used to it. Although baseball is less aerobic exercise demanding than many other sports, high altitude affects that sport's game play in several important ways. Denver's combination of altitude and a semi-arid climate (the city averages only about 16 in/400 mm precipitation annually) allows Batted ball to travel about 10% farther than at sea level, and also slightly reduces the ability of a pitcher to throw an effective breaking ball. The low humidity also causes baseballs to dry out, making it harder for pitchers to grip them and further reducing their ability to throw breaking balls. The Colorado Rockies have a very large home advantage.
The weather can also play a major factor. For example, the February average temperature minimum in Tel Aviv, Israel is , while the average at the same time in Kazan, Russia is , with snow being common. This means that when Rubin Kazan played at home to Hapoel Tel Aviv in the 2009-10 UEFA Europa League, Hapoel needed to acclimatize and were therefore at a disadvantage. Hapoel duly lost the match 3–0. However, a home stadium subject to frequent inclement weather can be a burden on the home team: the Buffalo Bills, whose home stadium (Highmark Stadium) is subject to high and unpredictable winds and lake-effect snow in the late fall and early winter, regularly suffer large numbers of injuries late in the season and the Bills have had to cancel practice due to the weather.
Sometimes the unique attributes of a stadium create a home-field advantage. The unique off-white Teflon-coated roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome trapped and reflected noise to such an extent that it was distracting or even harmful. This, combined with the color of the roof, caused opposing baseball players to commit more errors in the Dome than in other ballparks. While this is no longer an issue for opponents of the Minnesota Twins with that team's 2010 move to the open-air Target Field, it remained important to the many college baseball teams that played games in the Dome until its late 2013 closing. Hard Rock Stadium, the home stadium of the NFL's Miami Dolphins, is designed in such a way that when the sun is overhead, the home sideline is in the shade while the visitors sideline is directly in the sun's path. This, combined with the hot tropical climate South Florida receives, can lead to differences of up to or more between the two sidelines, with the visiting sideline temperature getting as high as 120 °F (49 °C). The parquet floor at the Boston Celtics' former home of Boston Garden contained many defects, which were said to give the Celtics, who were more likely to be familiar with the playing surface, an advantage. During the 1985–1986 season, the Larry Bird-led Celtics posted a home court record of 40–1; this record (since tied by the 2015-2016 San Antonio Spurs) still stands in the NBA.
Sports Illustrated, in a 17 January 2011 article, reported that home crowds, rigor of travel for visiting teams, scheduling, and unique home field characteristics, were not factors in giving home teams an advantage. The journal concluded that it was favorable treatment by game officials and referees that conferred advantages on home teams. They stated that sports officials are unwittingly and psychologically influenced by home crowds and the influence is significant enough to affect the outcomes of sporting events in favor of the home team.[Moskowitz, Tobias J., and L. Jon Wertheim, "What's Really Behind Home Field Advantage", Sports Illustrated, 17 January 2011, pp. 65–72.]
Other research has found that crowd support, travel fatigue, geographical distance, pitch familiarity, and referee bias do not have a strong effect when each factor is considered alone suggesting that it is the combination of several different factors that creates the overall home advantage effect. An evolutionary psychology explanation for the home advantage effect refers to observed behavioral and physiological responses in animals when they are defending their home territory against intruders. This causes a rise in aggression and testosterone levels in the defenders. A similar effect has been observed in football with testosterone levels being significantly higher in home games than in away games. Goalkeepers, the last line of defense, have particularly strong testosterone changes when playing against a bitter rival as compared to a training season. How testosterone may influence results is unclear but may include cognitive effects such as motivation and physiological effects such as reaction time.
An extreme example of home advantage was the 2013 Nigeria Premier League; each of the 20 teams lost at most 3 of 19 home matches and won at most 3 of 19 away matches. Paul Doyle ascribed this to visiting teams' facing "violent crowds, questionable refereeing and ... arriving just before kick-off after long road trips, often on hazardous surfaces".
The 2020–21 NHL season saw major disruption due to COVID-19-restricted conditions that resulted in bubble playoffs and ghost games, as fans were unable to attend in person. New research has shown that this led to a significant drop to home advantage compared with the previous six seasons. In 592 games played under the restricted conditions through March, home teams suffered a decline of 10% while road teams’ win rates increased by 7%.
Factors related to the game rules
In a number of sports, the hosting team has the advantage of playing with their first choice uniforms, while the visiting team wears their alternative
Away colours. Some sports leagues simply state that the team wears its away uniforms only when its primary jerseys would clash with the colors of the home team, while other leagues mandate that visiting teams must always wear their away colors regardless. However, sometimes teams wear their alternative uniforms by choice. This is especially true in North American sports where generally one uniform is white or grey, and "color vs. color" games (e.g., blue vs. red uniforms) are a rarity,
[ "Mets and Braves wearing color vs color" , SportsLogos.net, 2009 (Retrieved 5 March 2013)] having been discouraged in the era of black-and-white television.
[ "NFL Color vs. Color – Part I" , "Part II: Back to the Future" , "Part III: A Modest Proposal" , Phil Hecken, 2010 (Retrieved 3 March 2013)] Many teams from warm-weather cities may wear their white uniforms at home, forcing their opponent to wear dark uniforms in the hot weather. An exception is a rule in high school American football (except Texas, which plays by
College football rules), requiring the home team to wear dark jerseys and the visiting team to wear white jerseys, which may work as a disadvantage to the home team in hot-weather games.
In ice hockey, there are at least three distinct rule-related advantages for the home team. The first is referred to as "last change", where during stoppages of play, the home team is allowed to make player substitutions after the visiting team does (unless the home team ices the puck, in which case no substitutions are allowed). This allows the home team to obtain favorable player matchups. This rule makes the home team designation important even in games played on neutral ice. Traditionally, the second advantage was that when lining up for the face-off, the away team's centre always had to place his stick on the ice before the centre of the home team. However, in both the NHL and international rule sets, this now applies only for face-offs at the centre-ice spot; when a face-off takes place anywhere else on the ice, the defending centre has to place his stick first. The centre who is allowed to place his stick last gains the ability to time the face-off better and gives him greater odds of winning it. The third advantage is that the home team has the benefit of choosing whether to take the first or second attempt in a shootout.
In baseball, the home team – which bats in the bottom half of each inning – enjoys the advantage of being able to end the game immediately if it has the lead in the ninth inning (or other scheduled final inning) or in extra innings. If the home team is leading at the end of the top half of the ninth inning, the game ends without the bottom half being played. If the home team is trailing or the score is tied in the bottom half of the ninth inning or any extra inning, the game ends immediately if the home team takes the lead; the visiting team does not get another opportunity to score and the home team does not have to protect their lead. On the other hand, if the visiting team has the lead when the top half of the ninth inning or extra inning ends, the home team still gets an opportunity to score and so the visiting team must protect their lead. In addition, in the late innings, the home team knows how many runs they need to win or tie, and can therefore strategize accordingly. For example, in a tie game in the ninth inning or extra innings, the home team may employ strategies such as bunting or Stolen base, which oftentimes increase the chance of scoring one run, but decrease the chance of scoring multiple runs.
Additionally in baseball, the host team is familiar with the unique dimensions of their home field yielding them advantages (pitching, hitting, fielding) over visiting teams. Before the Major League Baseball labor agreement that ended the 2021–22 lockout saw the designated hitter added permanently in the National League,
Measuring and comparing of home-field advantage
Measuring the home-field advantage of a team (in a league with balanced schedule) requires a determination of the number of opponents for which the result at home-field was better (
), same (
), and worse (
). Goals scored and conceded – in so called
combined measure of home team advantage – are used to determine which results are better, same, and which are worse. Given two results between teams
and
,
played at
's field and
played at
's field, we can compute differences in scores (e.g. from
's point of view):
and
. Team
played better at home field if
, and
played better at away field if
