In team sports, the term home advantage – also called home ground, home field, home court, home ice or defender's advantage – describes the benefit that the home team is said to gain over the visiting team. This benefit has been attributed to the psychological effects supporting fans have on the competitors or referees, psychological or physiological advantages of playing near home in familiar situations, disadvantages away teams suffer from changing time zones or climates, or rigors of travel, and, in some sports, specific rules that favor home teams, whether directly or indirectly. In baseball and cricket in particular, the difference may also be the result of the home team having been assembled to take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of the home ballpark/ground, such as the distances to the outfield walls/boundaries; most other sports are played in standardized venues.
The term is also widely used in "best-of" playoff formats (e.g., best-of-seven) as being given to the team that is scheduled to play one more game at home than their opponent if all necessary games are played.
In many sports, such designations may also apply to games played at a neutral site, as the rules of various sports make different provisions for home and visiting teams. In baseball, for instance, the visiting team always bats first in each inning. Therefore, one team must be chosen to be the "visitor" when games are played at neither team's home field. Likewise, there are uncommon instances in which a team playing a game at their home venue is officially the "visiting" team, and their opponent officially the "home" team, such as when a game originally scheduled to play at one venue must be postponed and is later resumed at the other team's venue.
Advantages In most team sports, the home or hosting team is considered to have a significant advantage over the away or visiting team. Due to this, many important games (such as playoff or elimination matches) in many sports have special rules for determining what match is played where. In association football, matches with two legs, one game played in each team's "home", are common, with the team hosting the second leg having this home-field advantage. It is also common to hold important games, such as the Super Bowl, at a neutral site in which the location is determined years in advance. In many team sports in North America (including baseball, basketball, and ice hockey), playoff series are often held with a nearly equal number of games at each team's site. However, as it is usually beneficial to have an odd number of matches in a series (to prevent ties), the final home game is often awarded to the team that had more success over the regular season.
An example is UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Europa Conference League home and away legs, with weaker teams often beating the favorites when playing at home. The World Cup victories of Uruguay (1930), Italy (1934), England (1966), Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and France (1998) are all in part attributed to the fact that the World Cup was held in the winner's country. A 2006 study by The Times found that in the English Premiership, a home team can be expected to score 37.29% more goals than the away team, though this changes depending on the quality of the teams involved. Others have suggested that the increase in British medals during the 2012 Olympics may have been impacted by home court advantage. (However, having home court did not help Canada at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the only Summer Games at which the hosting country failed to win a single gold medal.)
The strength of the home advantage varies for different sports, regions, seasons, and divisions. For all sports, it seems to be strongest in the early period after the creation of a new league. The effect seems to have become somewhat weaker in some sports in recent decades.
Richard Adams and Susan Kupper described home-field advantage as an expertise deficiency. They demonstrated that, in theory and in practice, home-field advantage decreases as superiority of performance increases. They also showed that home-field advantage is not applicable for no-hit major league baseball games for pitchers who either replicated performance by winning two or more no-hitters or amassed a large number of career wins. Their general finding was that home-field advantage is a metric for the inability to maintain performance independent of environment, and that this metric is inversely related to variables of expertise.
In recognition of the difficulty in winning away matches, cup competitions in association football often invoke the away goals rule. Away goals can also sometimes be used to separate teams level on points and goal difference in league competitions.
Causes Factors related to the location and the venue There are many causes that attribute to home advantage, such as crowd involvement (for instance a 2024 study on ice hockey results during COVID-19, where no spectators were allowed at matches), travel considerations, and environmental factors. The most commonly cited factors of home advantage are usually factors which are difficult to measure and so even their existence is debated. Most of these are psychological in nature: the home teams are familiar with the playing venue, they can stay in their homes rather than a hotel, they don’t have to travel as far before the game, and they have the psychological support of the home fans.
Other factors, however, are easier to detect and can have noticeable effects on the outcome of the game. In American football, for instance, the crowd often makes as much noise as it can when the visiting team is about to run a play. That can make it very difficult for the visiting team's quarterback to call audible play changes, or for any player to hear the snap count. In contrast, the crowd is often quiet while the home team is on offense, and that enables the quarterback to use the hard count intended to draw the defense offsides as the defense can hear the hard count. In basketball, when a visiting player is making a free throw, home fans behind the backboard typically wave their arms or other objects in an attempt to break the visiting player's focus on making the shot. Environmental factors such as weather and altitude are easy to measure, yet their effects are debatable. Both teams have to play in the same conditions, but the home team may be more acclimated to local conditions with difficult environments, including possible effects from extreme temperatures and high altitude (such as the case of Denver teams, as well as the Mexico national football team, many of whose home matches are played in Mexico City, and even the Bolivian national team, which most often plays home contests in La Paz).
The stadium or arena will typically be filled with home supporters, who are sometimes described as being as valuable as an extra player for the home team. The home fans can sometimes create a psychological lift by cheering loudly for their team when good things happen in the game. The home crowd can also intimidate visiting players by booing, whistling, or heckling. Generally, the home fans vastly outnumber the visiting team's supporters. While some visiting fans may travel to attend the game, home team fans will generally have better access to tickets, and easier transportation to the event, thus, in most cases, they outnumber the visitors' fans (although in local derbies and crosstown rivalries, this may not always be the case). In some sports, such as association football, sections of the stadium will be reserved for supporters of one team or the other (to prevent fan violence), but the home team's fans will have the bulk of the seating available to them. In addition, stadium/arena light shows, sound effects, fireworks, cheerleaders, and other means to enliven the crowd will be in support of the home team. Stadium announcers in many sports will emphasize their announcements of the home team's goals and lineups to excite the crowd.
Ryan Boyko, a research assistant in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, studied 5,000 English Premier League games from 1992 to 2006, to discern any officiating bias and the influence of home crowds. The data was published in the Journal of Sports Sciences and suggested that for every additional 10,000 people attending, home team advantage increased by 0.1 goals. Additionally, his study found that home teams are likely to be awarded more penalty kicks, and this is more likely with inexperienced referees.
Further, home players can be accustomed to peculiar environmental conditions of their home area. The city of Denver, being above sea level, has thinner air, enough so that it affects the stamina of athletes whose bodies are not used to it. Although baseball is less aerobically demanding than many other sports, high altitude affects that sport's game play in several important ways. Denver's combination of altitude and a semi-arid climate (the city averages only about 16 in/400 mm precipitation annually) allows fly balls to travel about 10% farther than at sea level, and also slightly reduces the ability of a pitcher to throw an effective breaking ball. The low humidity also causes baseballs to dry out, making it harder for pitchers to grip them and further reducing their ability to throw breaking balls. The Colorado Rockies have a very large home advantage. This anomaly has been countered with Colorado's innovative use of humidors to keep the baseballs from drying out. Denver's altitude advantage has also come into play in gridiron football; the second longest field goal in National Football League history took place in Denver, as did the longest recorded punt. The national association football team of Bolivia also enjoys the advantage of playing at high altitude: at home during World Cup qualifiers at the even more extreme 3,600 m (11,800 ft) altitude of La Paz, they have even been known to beat Brazil, a dominant team regularly ranked number one in the FIFA World Rankings. In another game played in La Paz, Bolivia beat Argentina, ranked sixth in the world, then, 6–1, on April 1, 2009, Argentina's heaviest defeat since 1958. In cricket, the condition of the pitch and the behaviour of the ball when it bounces off the pitch varies significantly in different parts of the world, and consequently, the players on the visiting team must adjust to the ball behaving in an unfamiliar way to be successful on foreign surfaces; additionally, the home team has the right to adjust the preparation of its pitches in a manner enhancing its own strengths or exacerbating its opponent's weaknesses.
The weather can also play a major factor. For example, the February average temperature minimum in Tel Aviv, Israel is , while the average at the same time in Kazan, Russia is , with snow being common. This means that when Rubin Kazan played at home against Hapoel Tel Aviv in the 2009-10 UEFA Europa League, Hapoel needed to acclimatize, and were therefore at a disadvantage. Hapoel duly lost the match 3–0. However, a home stadium subject to frequent inclement weather can be a burden on the home team: the Buffalo Bills, whose home stadium (Highmark Stadium) is subject to high and unpredictable winds, and lake-effect snow in the late fall and early winter, regularly suffer large numbers of injuries late in the season, and the Bills have had to cancel practices due to the weather. A study, published in the Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine and reported by Forbes in 2016, analyzed NFL injury reports from 2012-2014 and found that players had a two-fold greater risk of concussions and a 1.5 times greater risk of ankle injuries in games played at or colder compared to games at or warmer.