Home advantage wasn't an accident for Jeff Beck, the Cambridge United manager in the '90s because he used groundsmanship as a weapon:
- plough the pitch to kneecap expensive teams with running/passing games
- narrow the pitch dimensions to minimise fancy wide plays
- grow the grass long and pour sand in the corners so long balls less likely to go out
He then recruited the tallest forwards he could and the strategy was simple, hoof it to the big fellas up front. None of this running/passing nonsense that requires money/talent.
I expect regulations might have improved since then...
The Goodison Park (built 1892) away dressing rooms are really Spartan and uncomfortable. They are poorly heated, are right under the stand (noisy), there's only one toilet etc.
I don't think Everton's home record can really get that much worse when they move into their new stadium next season though.
Some of the All or Nothing documentaries that cover Premier League teams include a lot of footage in the away dressing rooms, and they are almost all bad (though Goodison was weirdly cavernous and looks more annoying than normal).
Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.
I toured Stanford Bridge in the middle 2010s, they actually found uncomfortable away dressing rooms weren't the most effective as it either got the other team to go out and start warming up or riled them up.
When Mourinho started he brought in a sports psychologist who made the dressing rooms slightly heated with light pink walls and a comforting atmosphere. They ended up going 2+ years without a loss at home after that.
Reminder that the association of pink with femininity is a recent phenomenon. Before WW2, it used to be associated with masculinity.
'In 1918, an article in Ladies Home Journal advised: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”'
I do think that smooth grass fields (I mean billiard-like smooth) greatly help teams with the best players that can pass ball with no mistakes so those points #1 and #3 were probably very effective at closing the gap to the top teams. Every stadium in every major league around Europe has a smooth field of grass now, that's one of the reasons for having less and less surprises at the end of the year.
Broadcasters rule football. Even if there was no regulation, the broadcasters would be absolutely livid if their audience wanted to see the best players & top clubs play tiki-taka but were served smash & grab.
The Premier League & the Champions League are money spinning ventures for a reason.
What you say still happens in International Cricket, but not usually for club tournaments like The 100 or the Indian Premier League.
The broadcasters have absolutely no say whatsoever in how a groundsman prepares their pitch for an upcoming fixtures. In fact the kind of gamesmanship we are talking about happened as recently as the last few games of the most recent English season. Sunderland played Coventry in a two-legged playoff semi-final, having won the first leg 2-1 in Coventry they had a one-goal advantage going into the home fixture. Coventry had a player Milan van Ewijk who was able to deliver a very long and precise throw-in, so any throw in Sunderland conceded within 20-ish yards of their own goal would basically be like conceding a corner (a set-piece seen as a good goal-scoring opportunity). Sunderland mitigated against this by shrinking the distance between the touchline and the advertising boards at the side of the pitch, shortening the distance van Ewijk could run prior to taking his throw-in, and stunting his ability to turn it into a goal-scoring opportunity.
Consider the recent Club World Cup final and semi-finals, hosted on an American football field with shitty SIS pitch. I saw more slips from players in the semi-final than I've ever seen in a single game.
While FIFA recommends a specific size for pro teams, a legal pitch can have widths range from 46 to 91 metres and lengths of 91 to 119 metres. That’s a possible ratio range of 1:1 to 1:2.58.
I could imagine that stadium upgrades have meant that pitches don’t have as much variation as in the past too.
It makes sense when you remember that the vast majority of football is played by purely amateur players - the rules need to handle a village school as well as the world cup final.
In case anyone is interested, baseball has a similar variety in stadiums. Fenway Park comes to mind as a field with particular unique circumstances, like the Green Monster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Monster).
It also feels relevant to note that air pressure plays a role, and that players have an easier time hitting home runs in high altitude places like Colorado, so the game isn't the same everywhere.
Relevant: a Red Sox fan goes to Wrigley Field and finds it better[0]. For my money: Fenway Park is a goddamn terrible place to watch a ballgame, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Parking sucks, traffic sucks, the seating is cramped, and the food is expensive, but it's idiosyncratic, weird, and not designed to create an experience to within an inch of its life. Love that ballpark, and I say that as a Guardians fan by birth.
I've noticed teams that are used to playing on larger fields often have more inaccurate crosses when they play on narrower fields. Probably due to muscle memory on where their targets should be.
Tobias J. Moskowitz, a UChicago Economist, and L. Jon Wertheim studied home field advantage across all sports years ago, and concluded referee bias was real and was the driving force behind home advantage. It's explained in the book "Scorecasting"
For me, their findings were vindicated during the pandemic, when HFA all but disappeared. My guess is more recent decay might be because of VAR and goal line technology, which have become more integral to the game in recent seasons.
The dataset you need is the PL2 or academy matches. I don't think anyone shows up to those games, but the players are vying to be full premier league professionals. So travel arrangements would be similar, physical fitness similar, tactics similar, but there would be no fans.
As for the time trend, I suspect professionalization was happening slowly, then quickly. Of course there have been fully paid footballers for a long time, but if you look at stories from the 80s and early 90s, the guys would still smoke and eat burgers. It's only in recent decades that the stops have been pulled out, and everyone started doing full on sports science to maximize every chance.
Having absolutely everyone optimized physically also means you can explore strategies that used to be impossible. If you know you're at 80% due to traveling, your gegenpress is going to be a bit less attractive.
My first thought was that maybe fan culture and atmosphere has changed, which would have a more noticeable effect in the higher leagues, because lower leagues are still hilarious [1][2]. But the home advantage seems to affect all leagues the same, so I am probably wrong.
but the efforts to stamp out hooliganism have been harsh pretty much at all levels, in the English game. I think that's an overlooked item. It would be good to compare trends across different leagues, where there was little or no equivalent effort.
It'd be interesting to plot this against incidences of fouls and misconduct over the same time period. If play has gradually gotten cleaner, this would provide less opportunity for referee bias to affect outcomes even if referees themselves are not becoming less biased over time.
It would be useful to compare with other leagues where home field advantage is significant. I do not have any data but as a football fan I suspect the following variables are important:
- England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team.
- England is also a small country. The away team can arrive at the stadium within the day. Not only it means they are better rested but also home fans cannot bother them at the hotel making noise, throwing fireworks, etc. preventing them from sleeping.
- The FA is not as corrupt. Sure, certain teams can get away with playing dirty, but in general referees will show red card to a home team player, or call out a penalty for the away team.
- Less threatening environment at the stadium, both for the away team players and the referees. Nobody is throwing food, beer or anything at the players during the game, and hooligans will not try to harm the referee if the home team loses.
> England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team
Also pretty flat. No 1000m+ altitude differences. Competing in Colorado suuuucks.
> Given that the “only” COVID difference is the absence of supporters
I think the potential confounders (training was disrupted for months, games were played in summer months, season was compressed, etc.) make that "only" do far too much work here.
Readit News
- plough the pitch to kneecap expensive teams with running/passing games
- narrow the pitch dimensions to minimise fancy wide plays
- grow the grass long and pour sand in the corners so long balls less likely to go out
He then recruited the tallest forwards he could and the strategy was simple, hoof it to the big fellas up front. None of this running/passing nonsense that requires money/talent.
I expect regulations might have improved since then...
I don't think Everton's home record can really get that much worse when they move into their new stadium next season though.
Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.
When Mourinho started he brought in a sports psychologist who made the dressing rooms slightly heated with light pink walls and a comforting atmosphere. They ended up going 2+ years without a loss at home after that.
https://www.ncaa.com/video/football/2014-09-12/traditions-io...
'In 1918, an article in Ladies Home Journal advised: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”'
Deleted Comment
The Premier League & the Champions League are money spinning ventures for a reason.
What you say still happens in International Cricket, but not usually for club tournaments like The 100 or the Indian Premier League.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
While FIFA recommends a specific size for pro teams, a legal pitch can have widths range from 46 to 91 metres and lengths of 91 to 119 metres. That’s a possible ratio range of 1:1 to 1:2.58.
I could imagine that stadium upgrades have meant that pitches don’t have as much variation as in the past too.
It also feels relevant to note that air pressure plays a role, and that players have an easier time hitting home runs in high altitude places like Colorado, so the game isn't the same everywhere.
Parking sucks, traffic sucks, the seating is cramped, and the food is expensive, but it's idiosyncratic, weird, and not designed to create an experience to within an inch of its life. Love that ballpark, and I say that as a Guardians fan by birth.
https://www.overthemonster.com/2025/7/23/24472798/fenway-par...
https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/
https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-...
For me, their findings were vindicated during the pandemic, when HFA all but disappeared. My guess is more recent decay might be because of VAR and goal line technology, which have become more integral to the game in recent seasons.
As for the time trend, I suspect professionalization was happening slowly, then quickly. Of course there have been fully paid footballers for a long time, but if you look at stories from the 80s and early 90s, the guys would still smoke and eat burgers. It's only in recent decades that the stops have been pulled out, and everyone started doing full on sports science to maximize every chance.
Having absolutely everyone optimized physically also means you can explore strategies that used to be impossible. If you know you're at 80% due to traveling, your gegenpress is going to be a bit less attractive.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXmv7VK_110
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U (uncensored: https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/733659771889629... )
- England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team.
- England is also a small country. The away team can arrive at the stadium within the day. Not only it means they are better rested but also home fans cannot bother them at the hotel making noise, throwing fireworks, etc. preventing them from sleeping.
- The FA is not as corrupt. Sure, certain teams can get away with playing dirty, but in general referees will show red card to a home team player, or call out a penalty for the away team.
- Less threatening environment at the stadium, both for the away team players and the referees. Nobody is throwing food, beer or anything at the players during the game, and hooligans will not try to harm the referee if the home team loses.
Also pretty flat. No 1000m+ altitude differences. Competing in Colorado suuuucks.
I think the potential confounders (training was disrupted for months, games were played in summer months, season was compressed, etc.) make that "only" do far too much work here.