The Home Field Advantage
In a wide array of sports, there’s a marked home field advantage. When you’re playing at home, you’re much more likely to win than when you’re on the road.
Why is this? It’s easy to come up with explanations — sleeping in your own bed and eating home cooking, not having to get stiff and worn out from travel, being cheered on by supportive fans instead of booed by hostile ones, having officials who are intimidated by the home crowd, knowing how to cope with the idiosyncrasies of the playing field itself (the Green Monster at Fenway, the ivy at Wrigley [pictured above]) and so on — and the multitude of possibilities has been grist for the mill of thousands of discussions in sports bars and on sports-talk radio.
As it happens, there’s actually some systematic research on this very question. Not that it makes much difference, because almost everybody “knows” the answer already and isn’t really interested in the facts, and because, as is so often the way with social science research, many of the research findings point in different directions. Anyway, Jonah Lehrer recently did a nice overview of such research for the Boston Globe, here. It’s worth a look.
Comments
Do we have data on the magnitude of the HFA in different sports? If fans are a factor, the HFA should be lower for teams with poor attendance, greater for sports where the fans are closer to the players physically (basketball, hockey)or socially (college as opposed to pro).
Posted by: Jay Lvingston | June 8, 2008 01:57 PM
Jay:
Stated just a little differently, you’re interested in cross-sectional comparisons where the units of analysis are sports (college basketball, pro basketball, hockey, soccer, baseball, etc.). Some responses: (1) I don’t know of any such studies across a substantial range of sports; perhaps they’re out there and someone will chime in about them. (2) Unless the dependent variable is just win-lose percentage, the cross-sport comparisons could get tricky; e.g., how do you compare a 2-1 soccer score to a 97-86 basketball score? (3) Even if the dependent variable is just win-lose percentage, you’d have to reckon with the fact that a really good baseball team wins, what?, 60% of its games, but a really good pro football team does much better than that. Not an insuperable problem, but something to bear in mind. (4) With all the potential predictors that one can think of and a finite number of sports to compare, I suspect that the degrees of freedom problem would become very confining.
Posted by: Lee Sigelman | June 8, 2008 02:18 PM
I think there’s good reason to suspect that there are differences across sports in key drivers of home field advantage. In college sports, for example, stronger teams avoid optional road games against potentially strong opponents. I suspect that in both football and basketball that this contributes to the home field/court edge.
Posted by: David Sousa | June 8, 2008 03:36 PM
My Father, who was a Hall of Fame coach in basketball and football at a small college whose career
spanned 1945-1975 often stated that, in addition to all the reasons already mentioned, he felt that long trips (almost always on buses whose heaters never seemed to work in the winter) caused the players to over-eat through constant snacking due to boredom. This, combined with
fatigued limbs due to cramped buses meant lethargic per- formances.
The higher per- centage of home court wins in the 50’s when travel conditions were far more spartan and the ipod, game-boy, etc., not yet invented, seems to lead credence to this theory, especially as the scientific evidence of a causal link between boredom and over-eating is well documented.
Posted by: virgil xenophon | June 10, 2008 09:58 PM