09.12.2013
Home Ground Advantage
Memo to A league soccer supporters, no matter how good your songs are, or how loud you cheer, you have little influence over the outcome of a game.
A new study appearing in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, published by Sports Medicine Australia, has discovered that home ground advantage can have more to do with the distance the away team travels, than the noise the home team’s crowd makes.
The results of the study, Home Advantage in Australian Soccer, by Sydney University’s Chris Goumas, flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
“The general consensus amongst sports scientists is that home-team crowd support, which can affect both player performance and referee decision making, is the main cause of home advantage in soccer,” Goumas said.
“The results of the present study, however, suggest that when a soccer competition covers several time zones, travel effects such as jet-lag may play an even greater role than crowd support.
“The more time zones an A-League soccer team crosses when playing away from home, the worse they perform. When teams based within the same time zone play each other, there is little or no advantage gained by the home team. However, when two or more time zones are crossed, home teams score about twice as many goals as away teams.”
Goumas, who considers himself a soccer fan, was surprised by the results.
“Results of previous studies suggest that home-team crowd support is the major cause of home advantage in soccer, whereas away-team travel has little, if any, effect. The present study, however, found the opposite to be the case,” he said.
http://sma.org.au/2013/12/home-ground-advantage/