Teams win more often at home than away, across essentially every sport and league measured.
One of the most robust findings in sport, and its cause is not settled: travel, familiarity, crowd, and referee bias have all been proposed. Matches played behind closed doors during 2020 offered a natural experiment, and home advantage shrank markedly, which points at the crowd and at what the crowd does to officials.
In practice
- A league that publishes home and away splits shows the gap in every season it has records for.
- A season played in empty stadiums narrows the gap, which is evidence about mechanism rather than existence.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sport & Performance
- Essay
- The best-measured contests there are