Week 42: There’s No Place Like Home  

It takes 101 minutes, and an eventual meeting with a slightly less wonderful wizard than she was expecting, for the young Dorothy Gale to come to the above conclusion in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.

It used to be the same in football. But, at the moment anyway, not so much.

While I’d never put any numbers in this column that hasn’t at least been party to some research, I try not to go overboard. But yesterday, I had a proper go at the stats and came up with some startling findings that suggest that home advantage isn’t at all what it used to be.

But before everyone blames the lack of fans – an obvious culprit – it isn’t quite so simple and I’ll try not only to suggest why, but get the numbers across in a way that doesn’t leave you scratching your head like you do when someone climbs halfway up a tree rather than walk past you on a footpath these days.

I first got suspicious from a casual glance at recent results. There seemed to be a lot of away wins and although it wasn’t scientific, the anecdotal evidence looked pretty strong. To name some:

  • Manchester United (as detailed in this column last week) had one point – putting them 19th in the table for home form – from four matches at Old Trafford in the league, but a 100% win record from their three away games, including a fine 3-1 victory at Everton on Saturday.
  • Even more starkly, in the Championship, Preston North End are rock bottom of the home form table with five straight defeats and only one goal, but top of the away form chart with 13 points including a 4-2 win at Brentford and a 3-0 win at leaders’ Reading.
  • Continuing with Reading, they are top of their league but have still managed to lose their last two home games by a 3-0 margin.
  • Several other teams including Millwall, Stoke and Luton (all clubs that have relied on good home records for years) have done better on their travels than in their own stadiums. In fact, eleven Championship teams have a better PPG record away from home and Reading’s is identical (2.0 points from 6 home games and 2.0 points from 5 away ones)
  • Even my own club, Walsall, get in on the act. We have lost four games this season in total (one in the league, one in the EFL Cup, one in the FA Cup and one in the EFL Trophy) and they have all been at home, while we remain unbeaten away in all competitions.

So, with this in mind, I began trawling through the leagues for this season and the 2019/20 one to see if there were any patterns. There were and they were much more startling than I anticipated. I’ve tried to condense them into the key findings rather than just pour a whole lot of numbers onto the page but here goes.

The Premier League difference was huge. In 380 games last season, there were 172 (45%) home wins and 116 away wins (30%). In the 78 matches so far this season, at the time of writing, there were more away wins than home ones (the percentage of away wins is a staggering 43%).

It’s the same in the Scottish Premiership, where 42% of games have been away wins already, compared to 30% in the whole of last season. Home wins are, as you’d expect, significantly down in volume for both leagues.

It’s not confined to the UK either. In La Liga, Ligue 1 and Serie A, the trend is the same although the differences aren’t quite so big. Nevertheless, in Spain away wins account for a third of results (it was 27% in 2019/20), 34% of French top-flight results and 37% of matches in Italy’s top league.

The German Bundesliga didn’t have the same figures when it came to away wins but the number of home wins was significantly down (to 37%) when between 2012 and 2018 it had always been in the range of 44% to 49%. Last season, it went down to 40% with a high number of post-lockdown games seeing away wins or draws, when compared to other seasons.

But the Italian one really stood out. Their football was built on nailed-on home wins for years, with territorial advantage always a huge factor. To emphasise the point, in 2012/13, every single Serie A team had a far better home record than their away one and almost half of the games resulted in a home win compared to a quarter that saw the visiting team leave with the points. Likewise, in the Premier League in that same season, only one team – Aston Villa – had a better away record than at home and the home to away win percentages were 44% to 28%.

Villa are a classic example of the turnaround. They’ve recently lost at home to Leeds and Southampton and shipped a lot of goals in the process (they also beat Liverpool 7-2 so this is nothing if not full of exceptions) yet away from home they are faultless with three wins from three including a victory at current leaders, Leicester and on Sunday at Arsenal (traditionally not a happy hunting ground) where they won 3-0 and could have had more; including a disallowed goal after 48 seconds. By contrast, they won two away games in the whole of the 2019/20 season.

I could go on, but you get the point by now.

Yet this strange phenomenon doesn’t quite cascade all the way down. In Leagues One, the home wins are about the same but away wins have increased from 26% to 35%. In League Two, away wins have actually gone down by a couple of percentage points.

Before I turn into a full-time statistics geek, I’ll stop and try to address some of the why of all these numbers. I’m not sure the answers are completely conclusive but here are my thoughts on a few reasons why this is happening:

If They Only Had A Heart

There is an obvious correlation with the lack of fans. It makes a difference to the home team when they are cheered on by thousands of people who love them. Generally, the higher the club up the pyramid, the bigger the attendances, so it makes sense that the more fans that are missing, the harder it is for the home team; that might explain why the numbers are starker in the top divisions. But it can’t just be that simple or every league would be experiencing the same numbers.

If They Only Had The Nerve

Tactics also play a part. Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp both aspire to the counter-attacking philosophy that aims to disrupt teams in the defensive third where they are less prepared and also closer to their own goal. If attack is the best form of defence, then doing so when the opposition are least capable of dealing with it will inevitably lead to more chances and goals. Leicester and Southampton, as well as Villa, have quick and sharp finishers up front so this style is perfectly suited to them too and, of course, it also works better away from home where the home team feel obliged to take the initiative.

If They Only Had A Brain

Bit unfair this one but it broke the thread entirely if I didn’t use it. If I make a broad assumption and generalisation that the players at the top clubs and top leagues are better and maybe a bit more capable (when carrying out instructions) than those at lower levels, then the better players might be able to adapt to these new tactics more effectively. That might explain why the trend lessens as we go through each division of the EFL, for instance.

Follow The Yellow Brick Road

I’d say travel has to play a role too. Lower league clubs are more likely to make the journey to games on the day than go 24 hours earlier and stay overnight, so the more prepared and less-travelled sides might – especially when you also add the empty stadiums into the mix – find themselves better equipped to win away from home than a team that’s been cramped up on a coach or train for a few hours earlier that day.

Given all of this, England, who lost their last competitive home game to Denmark, might consider that talk of them having to play their next ‘home’ game in the Nations League in either Albania or Germany rather than at Wembley is actually a positive and not a negative.

The potential change (the FA are asking the government to make an exemption to get around it) is because of the travel ban on people coming from Denmark (England’s opponents, Iceland, play in Copenhagen three days before coming here) that’s been created by the potential mutation of that Wicked Witch of the East, Covid-19, when it passes from humans and minks.

Fur real! I’ll get my coat.

“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t you think?” 

After this week’s events and Greg Clarke’s resignation from the role of chairman, those at the FA probably wish they could decamp to an island overseas for a few weeks, never mind one game.

In another example of our already under-fire national sport shooting itself in the foot, Clarke made – on live-stream – awful stereotyped and outdated comments that offended more than half the global population while answering questions from a select committee of MPS as to why football isn’t doing enough. Say those words again slowly ‘having to explain to MPs – who have overseen the biggest shitshow in the history of shitshows since March – why you’re not doing enough’. That should be rock bottom, right there.

Except it wasn’t. As the ex-Chairman didn’t just shoot him and his organisation in the foot but blew off both legs as well in the process. And on the back of a less-than-ideal role played in the whole Project Big Picture debate a few weeks before.

On his ill-judged use of the word ‘coloured’ when talking about BAME footballers, he was asked to apologise by one of the committee, Kevin Brennan, and when doing so, he also said he had tripped over his words and this was as a result of spending time and working in the United States for many years and had been accustomed to using the term people of colour; a ‘product of their diversity legislation and positive discrimination format.’ Ironically, a diversity code is one of the most recent initiatives that The FA have produced.

But he’s been the FA Chairman since 2016 and one that has overseen numerous projects and incidents involving inclusion, safeguarding and sexual harassment as well as the Black Lives Matter campaign and many years of Kick It Out. Yet the words used were a throwback to the uneducated times in the 60s and 70s and have no place in society full stop, let alone within our beautiful and diverse game.

Greg, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

And you should really have known that already.

words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist

[P.S. Thanks to www.soccerstats.com for the data]