It’s always worthwhile digging through statistics to get a picture of what is likely to unfold in a football match. Statistics are the best predictors of outcomes in football matches, as quality football tips and predictions would show.One of the main football stats and intriguing factors for football is home advantage.
A team, playing at home, is expected to have some kind of advantage. Even if it is an underdog team at home in a match, they won’t be as big of an underdog on home soil as if they were on the road facing the same opponent.
So how much does home advantage play into results?
What’s Different About Home Advantage?
The ‘home boost’ is the perceived advantage that a team gains because of the premise of home comforts. The home team is in familiar surroundings and doesn’t have often demanding travel demands for a match day that the visiting team has.
The other major factor is partisan support. Having the majority of the crowd behind a team is naturally going to give them a lift, compared to a small section of visiting fans who are unlikely to be as vocally commanding.
Those factors generally give the home team extra impetus to be the ones to get on the front foot and attack. Most visiting teams simply turn up with a ‘siege mentality’ where they need to simply dig in from kick-off and put precedence on not losing.
What Do The Stats Say?
A look at any of the top European domestic leagues shows that the most frequent result is a home win. But the percentage value of how many home wins appear will vary quite a bit between leagues.
2022/23 Season Home Win Percentage
●English Premier League 48%
●Spain La Liga 48%
●German Bundesliga 47%
●France Ligue 1 43%
●Romania Liga 1 44%
●Italy Serie A 42%
The gulf between the 48% of home wins in the Premier League and the 42% returned in Italy’s Serie A is massive in terms of physical numbers. But the numbers do completely stack up to there being a clear precedent for home advantage.
But what does that mean for expectancy when it comes to match day? Assuming an average of a 45% home win rate, that is one of three potential outcomes. So the remaining 55% split roughly between the Draw and the Away Win, commonly averages out at about 25-28% for each.
So the home advantage stat is strong, but can’t be relied on solely and has to be stacked up with other statistics. The current form of a team, which is perhaps suffering from injury problems, can skew the numbers, for example.
The perceived strength of teams naturally plays a major part as well in things. A relegation-threatened team at home against a title challenger naturally isn’t going to gain enough from-home advantage to come up with an expected three points.
Look Back At Five Years
The previous completed season of a league can not be taken at face value, either. It is worth looking back at five years worth of history to gain a more steady picture of averages.
An average percentage of home wins across that extended period, helps to account for anomalous seasons when the home win rate is unnaturally higher or lower.
Watch Current Trends
The respective home form of individual teams is also worth studying. For example, SSC Farul Constanța surprised many by taking the Romania Liga title in the 2022/23 season.
The catalyst behind that success was their astounding home record. Farul Constanța won 17 of 20 home fixtures (D2 L1) in what was a staggering output. How much of a surprise was that?
The season before, SSC Farul Constanța had won only five home league fixtures, which sums up the importance of keeping up with current trends.
In Conclusion
Keeping an eye on trends is important as well as looking at historical data like head-to-head records. Home win statistics can also bleed into other informative stats.
Things like winning margins and the total goals in a particular team’s home fixture, for example, can add to the picture. Or how does a team perform in terms of match results after taking a first-half lead?
Invariably, home matches are easier to win than away ones and that’s very significant. The title winners across Europe are usually those teams who can make their home ground something of an impenetrable fortress.
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