Comparison of Home Advantage between Level 1 and Level 2 in Women’s Football Leagues

Abstract

Professional sports teams derive an advantage from playing at home; this phenomenon is known as home advantage. The aim of this study was to compare the magnitude of home advantage between levels 1 and 2 of women’s football leagues. A total of 10 countries were included, each for the most recent 9 seasons, resulting in 31,186 matches analysed. A preliminary analysis of the results was carried out in order to assess the difference in home advantage between level 1 and level 2 for each country separately. A two-sided paired t-test was used and the effect size was reported using Cohen’s d statistic. A general linear model was fitted and after adjusting for differences between seasons and between countries, the main finding was that there existed a small, yet significant difference between the home advantage of the two levels, with level 2 (mean of 55.5%) higher than at level1 (mean of 54.6%). The results therefore suggest that in women’s football there occurs the same phenomenon that has been shown to exist in women’s water polo and handball, and in men’s football. Some of the main factors that have been found to explain home advantage in men’s football appear to operate in a slightly different way when applied to women’s football. These are crowd support, familiarity, referees bias, travel effects and psychological factors.

Keywords

• home advantage
• levels of play
• match location
• performance analysis
• soccer