Home Advantage - Advantages of Being The Home Team - Causes of Home Advantage - Factors Related To The Location and The Venue

Factors Related To The Location and The Venue

There are many causes to home advantage ranging from crowd involvement to travel considerations to environmental factors. The most-commonly cited factors of home advantage are usually ones whose advantageous effects are difficult to measure and thus even their existence is debated. Most of these are psychological in nature, such as familiarity with the playing grounds, the ability for participants to lodge in their homes rather than in a hotel, less likelihood of travel immediately prior to the game, and the psychological support of the fans in attendance.

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. This 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 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 as both teams have to play in the same conditions. However, the home team may be more acclimated to local conditions with difficult environments such as extremely warm or cold weather, or high altitude (such as the case of the Denver Broncos).

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 the visiting fans may travel to attend the game, home team fans will generally have better access to tickets and easier transport to the event, thus in most cases outnumbering 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 emphasise the home team's goals and lineup 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 suggested that for every additional 10,000 people attending, home team advantage increased by 0.1 goals. Additionally, his study proved what many football fans already suspect, that home teams are likely to be awarded more penalty kicks, but crucially, this is more likely with inexperienced referees. So building referee profiles can clearly be a very telling refinement for HFA figures.

There are also factors having to do with players being accustomed to peculiar environmental conditions of their home area. The city of Denver, being a mile (1609 m) 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 most other sports, high altitude affects that sport's gameplay 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 pitchers to throw effective breaking balls. 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. Consequently, the Colorado Rockies have a very large home advantage, with a 30% better home than away record. 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; two of the three longest field goals 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 team regularly ranked number one in the FIFA World Rankings. More recently, Bolivia beat Argentina, who were ranked sixth in the world, 6–1 on April 1, 2009, Argentina's heaviest defeat since 1958.

The weather can also play a major factor. For example, the February average temperature minimum in Tel Aviv, Israel is 50 °F (10 °C), while the average at the same time in Kazan, Russia is 10 °F (−12 °C), with snow being common. This means that when Rubin Kazan played at home to 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. This advantage, however, can also be a disadvantage to the home team, as weather conditions can form just as much of an impedance to the home team as the visitors; the Buffalo Bills, whose home stadium (Ralph Wilson Stadium) is subject to high and unpredictable winds and lake-effect snow in the late fall and early winter, regularly suffers large numbers of injuries late in the season.

Sometimes the unique attributes of a stadium create a home-field advantage. The unique off-white Teflon-coated roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome traps and reflects noise to such an extent that it can become distracting or even harmful. This, combined with the color of the roof, can cause opposing baseball players to commit more errors in the Dome than in other ballparks. While this is no longer an issue for opponents of the Minnesota Twins with that team's 2010 move to the open-air Target Field, it remains important to the many college baseball teams that play games in the Dome today. The parquet floor at the Boston Celtics' former home of Boston Garden contained many defects, which were said to give the Celtics, who were more likely to be familiar with the playing surface, an advantage. During the 1985–1986 season, the Larry Bird-led Celtics posted a home court record of 40-1; this record still stands in the NBA. Memorial Gymnasium, the venue for men's and women's basketball at Vanderbilt University, was built in 1952 with the team benches at the ends of the court instead of along one of the sidelines, a setup that was not unusual at the time. However, the configuration is now unique in U.S. major-college sports, and has been said to give Vandy an edge because opposing coaches are not used to directing their teams from the baseline.

In some sports there are rule advantages for the home team. In ice hockey, the home team gets three advantages. The first is the last change of lines. Whenever there is a face-off, the home team can wait for the visiting team to place their players on the ice. Afterwards, the home team can match the players to give them an advantage. The second is a face-off advantage where the visiting team center must place his stick on the ice prior to the face-off before the home team. The third is during the shootout the home team can pick whether to take the shootout first or second.

Sports Illustrated, in a 17 January 2011 report, reported that home crowds, rigor of travel for visiting teams, scheduling, and unique home field characteristics, were not factors in giving home teams an advantage. The journal concluded that it was favorable treatment by game officials and referees that conferred advantages on home teams. Sports Illustrated stated that sports officials are unwittingly and psychologically influenced by home crowds and the influence is significant enough to effect the outcomes of sporting events in favor of the home team.

Other research have found that crowd support, travel fatigue, geographical distance, pitch familiarity, and referee bias do not have a strong effect when each factor is considered alone suggesting that it is the combination of several different factors that creates the overall home advantage effect. An evolutionary psychology explanation for the home advantage effect refers to observed behavioral and physiological responses in animals when they are defending their home territory against intruders. This causes a rise in aggression and testosterone levels in the defenders. A similar effects has been observed in football with testosterone levels being significantly higher in home games than in away games. Goalkeepers, the last line of defense, have particularly strong testosterone changes when playing against a bitter rival as compared to a training season. How testosterone may influence results is unclear but may include but cognitive effects such as motivation and physiological effects such as reaction time.

Read more about this topic:  Home Advantage, Advantages of Being The Home Team, Causes of Home Advantage

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