Home Field Advantage In The English Premier League

In my never-ending quest to be like my idol Bill Barnwell as well as understand as much as possible about the very opaque world of sports analysis, I’ve used Barnwell’s method for deriving NFL teams home field advantage for the English Premier League.

Managers and executives in the honeymoon stage, newly in charge of a club in the Premier League, frequently talk about making their home ground a “fortress.”  Brendan Rodgers has mentioned numerous times since joining Liverpool FC in 2012 that one of his goals is to return Liverpool FC and, by extension, their home stadium of Anfield to the glory days of the 1970s and 80s.  Those were days during which Anfield was purportedly a bastion of invincibility where the Reds graced their supporters with title win after title win.  The goal of my analysis, much like Barnwell’s for the NFL, is to understand what kind of home field advantage teams in the Premier League actually enjoy and who reaps the most reward from it.  For those who haven’t read Barnwell’s column, I’ll briefly explain his methodology in deriving home field advantage.

Anfield: home of Liverpool FC (Liverpool, England)

His method investigates the point differential between how many points a team scores and allows at home, versus how many they score and allow on the road.  The point differential on the road is then subtracted from the point differential at home, and that number is then divided by two.  That final number represents home field advantage, or HFA in the tables below.  In the context of the Premier League, I used goals scored versus goals conceded at home, subtracted by goals scored versus goals conceded on the road, divided by two.  The goal differential is divided by two in order to compare a team’s home form with how they would be expected to perform on a neutral field.  The final HFA number means to say that if a team has an HFA of 100, they are expected to be 100 goals better over the course of the 14 year sample at their home ground than they would be on a neutral field in that same period of time.

There are a few challenges in translating this methodology perfectly to the Premier League.  As you may have been able to guess yourself, there are many differences between the way the Premier League and the NFL are run; the most obvious of which are the concepts of promotion and relegation.  For those unfamiliar: each season, the three teams that finish with the lowest points total are relegated into the second division of English football, the Championship, and the top three sides from the Championship are promoted to play with the big boys in the Premier League.  There are millions of dollars in television rights, match day revenue, merchandising, and immeasurable fan agony/ecstasy at stake each season for teams that flounder towards the bottom of the table. The promotion/relegation concept is one of the most endearing and exciting parts of following the Premier League year after year.  However, it makes consistent analysis of home field advantage in the EPL difficult because the same teams aren’t present year in and year out.  As a result, I’ll detail my findings for all teams that have been in the Premier League, even if their stint was limited to one season, since 1999-2000.  I’ve included them as to further illustrate the dangers of small sample size, as well as the incredible gap between a handful of well-financed teams consistently at the top of the league compared to everyone else.

One of the nice things about the Premier League that actually makes this home field analysis study a little cleaner than its counterpart in the NFL is that the EPL plays a round robin schedule every year.  Each team plays every other team in the league twice; once home, once away.  This makes for an even split in terms of competition faced and location, and eliminates any need to consider strength of schedule.  No need to carry on that Manchester United got to feed off of a bad Blackburn Rovers team and pad their stats by destroying them 7-1 in 2011; every team in the Premier League was afforded the same luxury that season. 

One of my hypotheses prior to taking a look at the data was that the teams that would most likely benefit from a home field advantage (as we’ve defined it here) were ones that have largely remained in the Premier League for the past 14 years, but have not been among the most successful.  Perennial mid-table sides, like Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, are two that most obviously leap to mind when thinking about this concept anecdotally.  They’ve spent a combined 27 of a possible 28 years in the top division of English football, with only Newcastle being relegated for the 2009-10 campaign.  However, they both frequently finish in the middle/middle of the top of the table, with neither team enjoying a final league position higher than 3^rd over the course of the sample.  Their combined average league finish was 8.96 for that same period.  It makes some rational sense that squads enjoying enough success to stay in the top division but not enough to be consistently elite and competing for the title would see the biggest discrepancy between home and away form. 

Another one of my hypotheses prior to seeing the numbers was that teams such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal that frequently finished near or at the top of the table would not see a significant home field advantage because of their consistent quality.  These four teams, historically referred to as “the big 4” are frequently very good (and very rich) and thus seem likely to both score many and concede few goals regardless of where they play.  Anfield’s home field credentials were mentioned earlier in the context of decades gone by, but the title of “stadium where you can expect to earn no points as a visitor” has been, like the Premier League title itself, handed over to Manchester United and their home ground Old Trafford in the last two decades.  I did not expect to see a significant difference between home and away form for Manchester United in particular, but equally by extension for Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal.

The statistics used to calculate the HFA data below were pulled from the excellent soccer data website whoscored.com, and their stats unfortunately only goes back as far as the 1999-2000 season.  The analysis also does not include the 2013-14 season, which is currently underway. 

	Team	HFA Total	PL Seasons	HFA/Season
1	Tottenham	137.5	14	9.8
2	Newcastle United	125.0	13	9.6
3	Manchester United	124.5	14	8.9
4	Everton	113.5	14	8.1
5	Liverpool	111.0	14	7.9
6	Chelsea	110.5	14	7.9
7	Arsenal	107.5	14	7.7
8	Fulham	105.0	12	8.8
9	West Ham	100.0	11	9.1
10	Manchester City	95.5	12	8.0
11	Aston Villa	90.0	14	6.4
12	Blackburn	87.0	11	7.9
13	Sunderland	84.5	11	7.7
14	Bolton	77.0	11	7.0
15	Portsmouth	69.0	7	9.9
16	Birmingham	65.5	7	9.4
17	Southampton	62.5	7	8.9
18	Stoke	57.5	5	11.5
19	Middlesbrough	56.5	10	5.7
20	West Bromwich Albion	44.5	7	6.4
21	Charlton	43.5	7	6.2
22	Wigan	37.0	8	4.6
23	Norwich	33.0	3	11.0
24	Derby	26.0	4	6.5
25	Coventry	24.0	2	12.0
26	Bradford	23.0	2	11.5
27	Watford	23.0	2	11.5
28	Leeds	22.0	5	4.4
29	Reading	18.0	3	6.0
30	Wolverhampton Wanderers	17.5	4	4.4
31	Swansea	16.5	2	8.3
32	Ipswich	16.0	2	8.0
33	Milton Keynes Dons	16.0	1	16.0
34	Leicester	15.5	4	3.9
35	Burnley	15.0	1	15.0
36	Sheffield United	14.5	1	14.5
37	Sheffield Wednesday	14.0	1	14.0
38	Crystal Palace	12.5	1	12.5
39	Queens Park Rangers	10.5	2	5.3
40	Hull	8.0	2	4.0
41	Blackpool	4.5	1	4.5

You’ll notice that there are 41 teams listed here¹.  As discussed earlier, one of the difficulties in looking at the Premier League table statistics is that the teams in the top 20 of English football differ from year to year.  There are a few teams listed where a home field advantage is hard to discern because they only survived in the Premier League for a handful of seasons, or in the case of poor Blackpool and their fantastically orange jerseys, a single year.  The bottom half or so of the list all have less than 10 years of Premier League experience since 1999-00, and their HFA reflects both the small sample size as well as their poor quality in the years in which they delighted (or depressed, as the case may be) their fans with top division football.  To account for teams that suffered this fate, I’ve also included in the table “PL Seasons,” a fairly self explanatory title stating how many years that team spent in the Premier League, to provide some context.

As you can see from the table, I was somehow (shockingly) correct with one of my hypotheses.  Tottenham and Newcastle, two clubs that leap to mind when thinking about middling sides that hang around the top half of the table but never spend much time outside of that area, are 1^st and 2^nd respectively in total home field advantage. In similar fashion, Everton should be no surprise at 4^th on the list either; they share a similar pedigree since 1999-2000.  Again, the HFA number represents how many goals a team was better at home versus on a neutral field in the past 14 seasons of Premier League football.  This means that Tottenham have enjoyed 137.5 goals worth of home field advantage just from playing at White Hart Lane as opposed to a neutral site since 1999-2000, roughly 9.8 goals per season.  Where I was dreadfully wrong, however, was my prediction regarding “the big 4” as they were traditionally known; Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal enjoy 3^rd, 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th ranked home field advantages respectively.  Despite being prolific goal scorers and stingy defenders outside of their home grounds, they still experience a noticeable bump in performance in front of stands filled with their own supporters.

White Hart Lane: home of Tottenham FC (London, England)

In addition to analyzing how home field advantage stacked up in terms of goal differential, I wanted to briefly explore a more utilitarian view of a squad’s form: results.  I took a look at the same sample of teams and seasons of the Premier League and added up how many points² they earned at home over the course of the past 14 campaigns.  To view this as equitably as possible, I took the number of points each team earned at home and divided it by the number of years they appeared in the EPL.  That final number, “Pts/G/Season” represents how many points a given team earned per game per Premier League campaign. 

	Team	Pts/G Home	PL Seasons	Pts/G/Season
1	Manchester United	34.47	14	2.46
2	Arsenal	31.95	14	2.28
3	Chelsea	31.84	14	2.27
4	Liverpool	29.00	14	2.07
5	Tottenham	26.53	14	1.89
6	Everton	24.68	14	1.76
7	Newcastle United	22.63	13	1.74
8	Aston Villa	21.63	14	1.55
9	Manchester City	21.42	12	1.79
10	Fulham	19.68	12	1.64
11	Blackburn	16.68	11	1.52
12	West Ham	16.63	11	1.51
13	Bolton	16.11	11	1.46
14	Middlesbrough	14.79	10	1.48
15	Sunderland	14.63	11	1.33
16	Southampton	10.68	7	1.53
17	Birmingham	10.32	7	1.47
18	Portsmouth	10.32	7	1.47
19	Charlton	10.26	7	1.47
20	Wigan	9.95	8	1.24
21	West Bromwich Albion	8.58	7	1.23
22	Leeds	8.05	5	1.61
23	Stoke	8.05	5	1.61
24	Leicester	5.37	4	1.34
25	Wolverhampton Wanderers	4.58	4	1.14
26	Norwich	4.42	3	1.47
27	Reading	4.26	3	1.42
28	Derby	4.16	4	1.04
29	Ipswich	3.16	2	1.58
30	Swansea	3.00	2	1.50
31	Coventry	2.95	2	1.47
32	Bradford	2.37	2	1.18
33	Queens Park Rangers	2.11	2	1.05
34	Hull	2.00	2	1.00
35	Watford	1.95	2	0.97
36	Sheffield United	1.42	1	1.42
37	Burnley	1.37	1	1.37
38	Milton Keynes Dons	1.32	1	1.32
39	Crystal Palace	1.21	1	1.21
40	Sheffield Wednesday	1.11	1	1.11
41	Blackpool	1.05	1	1.05

Unsurprisingly Manchester United tops the list, coming the closest to earning the 3 possible points per game at home of any team in the league for the last decade and change.  This result is obviously expected: of the last 14 Premier League titles, Manchester United have taken home a stunning 8 of them.  Eight!  What this means to say is, Manchester United is pretty good at earning points no matter where they go, but particularly at home, at a rate that nobody has been able to match since the turn of the century³.  Arsenal, Chelsea, and Liverpool round out the top 4, and our favorite mid-table/sometimes-slightly-better sides Tottenham, Everton, and Newcastle make up 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th places.

A common refrain when discussing home field advantage is the idea of “home-cooking,” in general referring to teams performing better at home due to a cocktail of: the home crowd, lack of travel, familiarity with local weather conditions, and most importantly, biased officiating.  Any number and combination of those factors can explain much of what I broke down above, but it’s challenging in football to pull officiating decisions out of the context of the game.  You could theoretically take a look at the differential between yellow/red cards awarded to the home team as opposed to the road team, but that still doesn’t account for all of the offside decisions, free kicks awarded, throw-ins given, goal kicks as opposed to corner kicks awarded, non-calls, etc.  This is a very long winded way of saying that home field advantage is likely influenced by biased officiating, but its equally unlikely that referees are the only factor that tangibly impact the game.  Thus, it becomes very difficult to take apart the individual events that make up a 90-minute contest and say with certainty that the referees’ presence affected them in a given way, especially one that positively affected a team in their home ground over the course of a relatively large sample. 

Though these results are basically expected given what we’ve derived from the goal differential and HFA above, what’s interesting to note is what these points represent.  Teams (such as Liverpool and Tottenham) that were close to 2.0 points per home game largely either drew or won their home games over the last 14 seasons, earning a pretty decent split between 1 point and 3 points for each match in front of their supporters.  While there were assuredly losses sprinkled throughout, they benefitted from a near guarantee that they would gain something from each outing at their home ground. This is undoubtedly useful in ensuring a long and reasonably successful tenure in the Premiere League and helps explain certain teams’ longevity in the top flight of English football.


Footnotes  

¹: One of my favorite parts of doing this analysis was being confronted with how many absolutely absurd names there are for teams in English football.  The red squiggly line claiming you spelled something wrong in Microsoft Word came up 9 times!  Isn’t it incredibly bizarre that there is a team called Sheffield Wednesday?  That would be like a team on this side of the pond called Boston Friday.

²: Points are determined in the Premier League as such: 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, and 0 points for a loss.  Teams that are level on points go to a tiebreaker to determine their final league position, determined by goal differential (goals scored – goals allowed). 

³: If I had included statistics from this season (2013-14) either pro-rated for a full season or not, Manchester United’s home record would surely have taken a noticeable hit.  In 13 matches at Old Trafford under new manager David Moyes, United have only taken 21 points of a possible 39, to the tune of 6 wins, 4 losses, and 3 draws.  That’s only 1.61 points per game, almost a full point below their average over the last 14 years. Though the season is far from over, they’re the only member of the “big four (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United) that has taken a noticeable dive in home form.  This is where you can feel free to throw that whole “SMALL SAMPLE SIZE!!!1” thing I keep obnoxiously saying in my face, because, well, it is.