Comment by elgenie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elgenie | Hacker News Reader

Home field advantage lessening but not disappearing is as expected. There are two major sources of home field advantage (basing on US sports):

* What fans influence: subconscious referee biases (not wanting to be booed for a close call), heckling that slightly impacts players’ focus, objects being waved in their line of sight, noise levels rising at inopportune times, etc.

* Travel/comfort: the home team players sleep in their own custom-tailored sleeping environments (these can include stuff like oxygen tents, not just nice mattresses), don’t spend time encased in a plane / train / bus environment not designed for optimizing future athletic performance, and don’t have travel stresses and logistical headaches. Also for those inclined, the local club / strip club / groupie scene doesn’t hold the same mysterious allure on a random Tuesday night as it might for the lad from out of town.

The second set of factors remains even when fans aren’t allowed inside the arena.

This is England, where all of the grounds are in driving distance of each other and an "away" game might well be in the same city.

It would be interesting to control for distance travelled, and see if a third factor emerges where teams play worse even if they can stay at home and don't have a significant train/plane/bus journey to make. The third factor could be very minor differences between the grounds, or a pure placebo effect, or a tactical reaction to the placebo effect (teams often set up more conservatively away from home because they expect to be at a disadvantage).

(I haven't read the article yet - I've used up all my free Economist articles - so maybe it touches on this, but it's neglected in your post).

The article covers leagues all across Europe not just England

I actually explored all those in my research a few years ago, but stateside and with baseball as the subject: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/homefield-advantage/

I don't see an attempt there to control for distance. If I'm reading it right, you've explored the variation in home advantage over time, between ballparks, and between teams (which turns out to be significantly different from ballparks - a surprising finding). The very last paragraph says you've left examining the effect of distance to "a better study". What am I missing?

I've seen results before from American sports saying travelling East is worse for a team than travelling West, because of jetlag effects, and travelling to Colorado is bad, because of altitude effects. Those results would be tricky to tease out with your approach: if West Coast teams consistently perform 5% worse when playing on the East Coast, you can't tell that apart from East Coast teams playing 5% worse on the West coast by looking solely at win rates. The study I'm thinking of did something clever with looking at multi-game series to evaluate the jetlag effect.

The assumption was that teams from the Midwest would suffer least if it were purely distance (as they have the least shift/average travel) but that didn't bear out.

Have they? They have to travel half the distance, 100% of the time, compared to the coastal teams who travel the full distance across America half the time. That's in the "spherical cow" situation where all the East teams play in New York and all the West Coast teams play in LA...but if you add up the real miles travelled its probably within 20%.

Sure, but they never\* have to travel the full coast-to-coast, which is presumably where the worst of its effects, if any, would be realized.

And maybe not so relevant these days because most pitches are standard size, but years ago football pitches could vary in size, 90-120m in length, and 45-90m in width, maybe in the past even more, I remember some quoting some pitches as long as 130m+

Teams who were on the boundaries of these often took advantage of it, my home team played in a larger than average pitch and you would clearly see teams that went in full pressure to lose a lot of gas by the second half, the best coaches knew how to make this count. On the other side of the spectrum, teams with shorter fields favoured playing long balls straight from goal kicks to the strikers.

Tbf I miss a little bit the days where these small inconsistencies would affect the game and require a little bit more studying on the coaches part.

Same, my old home team used to have a pitch on the smaller end of the spectrum and you could really see the impact it had on teams who were used to having space to build up plays.

The home fans were also much more in their faces (though it never helped seemingly when we fell off a cliff at the 80 minute mark to throw it all away...)

The numbers you quoted are still the standard although international pitches are constrained to 64-75m wide, 100-110m long. That probably means top teams are likely to use the international standard or at least have the option to mark the pitch thusly when things like the World Cup or Euros need stadiums.

In Brazil they would vary wildly so that's where my nostalgia comes from, after the WC in 2014 pretty much all of them were standardised to 105x68

I remember Nottingham Forest (my team) had the widest pitch, and Arsenal (famous for playing dull boring football) had the narrowest.

However, the really interesting thing was I remember hearing an interview with an Arsenal player (possibly Lee Dixon) saying he knew just how to hit a soft pass into a shallow groove that ran along the side of the pitch - it looked like the ball was going to go out of play but it would catch this groove and move up the pitch instead.

Rather sadly the Premier League now has a mandated standard pitch size, and there are only a few outliers remaining (basically older stadia where the architecture precludes conformance). So any new stadium has to conform to the standard dimensions, e.g. the new White Hart Lane (whereas the old White Hart Lane had a smallish pitch, which was often touted as conveying some advantage to Tottenham, especially most recently when playing an energetic pressing style under Pochettino)

I think to add to the travel/comfort one - there's possibly also some advantage to doing all your matchday prep in a familiar environment where you spend a lot of time. I know from playing hockey as a student I felt much more calm and loose getting ready, warming up etc at our "home" facilities (where we'd train every week and play every other week) than doing the same at some other location (which we might only visit once a year). Something about the foreign surroundings can put you a little on edge or distract you.

Maybe the difference is minimal and melts away after the first ~15 minutes when you get into the game, but you can yourself into quite a big hole in the first 15 minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRx3KrQ83mc)

It's going to be an interesting natural (unnatural?) experiment to watch with NHL playoffs, with the teams playing in the "Bubble" in Edmonton and Toronto. No crowds, no noise, no pump-up-music. Would probably feel closer to an outdoor game.

But not the outdoor games they play in football stadiums.

Went to one. Was way Wilder than a typical hockey game

I must confess that the Hockey I played was much less cool than Ice Hockey :-)

Thanks for the video. I still have no idea of the rules, but it was fun to watch nevertheless.

Yeah it was a bit of a rollercoaster :-) I feel the same way with NFL, it's impressive and I like to see it but really I don't know what's going on tactically

It's also the fact that you're in a new sleeping enviroment. People tend not to sleep well in novel environments, called the 'first night effect', until they become comfortable to their new surroundings. So even if the athletes did custom-tailor their sleeping situation to be just like at home, ti still probably won't be good enough to give them a home-field level of sleep quality.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)...

Home fans in European football and in South America are notoriously hostile, I've played in front of 3k crowd and its difficult, the professionals are obviously much stronger mentally but I can't imagine 70k crowd in derby match hating you. Americans sports fans are more like going to Disneyland compared to it.

The article is all about the Europe version where the teams don't need to have sleep overs or take plane but the football team's bus.

Also pitch sizes are not strict and both width/length vary.

The comment doesn't cover the article contents.

You’re missing the third: weather. Particularly in the NFL, some teams have high difficulty coping with foreign weather. The Patriots infamously are unable to play in the heat of Miami. Green Bay is extremely cold which often limits offenses used to warm weather. Seattle is routinely rainy and makes things easier on their secondary.

There is a third type: structural home field advantage. Examples of these include Boise State's bright blue turf, Colorado teams playing home games at higher altitudes than most other teams, and hockey boards that bounce the puck certain ways.

Weather, altitude, blue turf, hockey boards, shooting background, etc I'd generally lump in under comfort and familiarity.

However, structural advantages do exist. The best example is actually MLB, where each team's field is shaped differently. The dimensions of the park impact hitters to an extent that it makes sense to tailor the roster composition to the yard at the margins: lefty hitters who loft many short flyballs in Yankee Stadium will hit homers that would be easy outs in most places, the typical left fielder won't be able to cover enough ground defensively in Pittsburgh, etc.

I was watching Ken Burns' Baseball many years ago and this reminded me of an interesting bit of trivia:

Many years ago, fans were allowed in the outfield at baseball games and were held back by a rope. A home run was when the ball flew (or rolled) past the rope.

Since the "line" was just a flexible rope, when the home team was batting the crowd would push the rope forward to help raise the odds of there being a home run. When the away team was batting, they would pull the rope back to lessen the odds.

Also, reminds me of the old Gatorade commercials with Old Shaq were he talks about how basketball changed (in the future) and he says "And then they put in the moving backboard..."

Seahawks 12th man !!

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