These have been strange times, this 2014-15 Hyundai A-League season. Grand finalists Sydney FC lost five games during the regular season – all of those defeats came at home. Outgoing champions Brisbane Roar scored fewer and conceded more goals at Suncorp than at all other venues combined. Even the Newcastle Jets won twice as many games away than they did at home. (Just two wins away to one win at home for the jaded Jets, but the fact stands – they were twice as likely to win on the road than at Hunter Stadium this season.)
Home ground advantage has been turned on its head for several clubs over the past seven months or so. While it is long recognised that teams have better results overall at home than when on the road, this season only Melbourne Victory, Perth Glory, Melbourne City, Central Coast Mariners and Western Sydney Wanderers won more at their home venue than away. The overall ratio of wins at home (54) over wins away (48) was pretty close to parity, at 1.13.
Remarkably, there have been much worse A-League seasons for home teams. The first season of the revamped national competition in 2005-06 was fairly ordinary for home sides. The inaugural competition kicked off in August 2005 with away wins for Adelaide United (over Newcastle) and Central Coast (over Perth) on the opening night. Home teams won just two of the first 10 games. In a brand new competition where home fans’ satisfaction was of paramount importance, paying customers were not getting what they wanted.
By the end of that first season 10 years ago, just a third of matches had been won by the home team: the ratio of home to away wins was much less than one (0.80). In season three, the number of home wins was again less than away wins. It was a mystifying quirk of the fledgling A-League, in which no two teams were from the same city (for the first few seasons at least), meaning that almost all away games were genuine away trips and home ground advantage was supposed to be sacred.
The home ground factor was more apparent in the former National Soccer League. No season in the old national league, which ran from 1977 to 2004, finished with more away wins than home wins. Over these 28 NSL seasons, the overall home-to-away win ratio was well above one (1.57).
Perhaps the perceived advantage of playing at home is slowly started to lose its influence over time. For a longer-term analysis, the 117 past and present seasons of English professional football provides a firm population – over 190,000 match results – to determine real trends. Since 1888 in England there has been an unmistakable trend of declining home ground advantage. What was a ratio of 2.67 before the second world war fell to 2.15 between 1945 and 2000, and has dropped further to 1.56 since the turn of the 21st century. The past three seasons have seen the lowest ratios of home-to-away wins of all English professional league seasons since 1888-89, at 1.38 (in 2012-13), 1.36 (2013-14) and 1.36 (2014-15) in the top four tiers combined.
Why would there be a decline in benefit from playing at home? More than likely it’s from better preparation for away teams in the modern era, including more comfortable travelling and accommodation environments than in previous years. Another theory is a more balanced performance of match officials – being less swayed by the home crowd in their decision-making (consciously or otherwise) compared with referees of the past.
For some teams, there may even be benefits to be had from playing away in the modern era. Aspects of travelling such as team bonding and being able to focus on the upcoming match – away from the distractions of home life – might be providing an edge over host teams in terms of match-day preparation. With Sydney FC yet to lose an away game heading into the 2015 grand final, it may be that coach Graham Arnold has found a way to tap into this.
Off the park, we have seen a negative impact of teams underachieving at home. Over the 2014-15 A-League regular season, losing a match appears to have had an adverse effect on crowd attendance at the next game. Compared with an overall season average of 12,514, the average crowd for matches where the home team had lost its previous home match was 10,783, down 13.8% on the average for all games. Taking out the skewing impact of the three Sydney and three Melbourne derbies, this detrimental effect on attendance was seen across all 10 A-League clubs.
To account for the significant impact on individual crowds that one-off factors such as derby matches, the weather or mid-week scheduling can have, Australian league attendances over a much longer period can be assessed. For the 6,799 regular season matches played in all 38 Australian national league seasons back to 1977, the average crowd stands at 5,070. Over the same period, the average crowd for matches where the home side had lost its previous home match was 4,390, or 13.5% down on the overall average. For clubs who had lost their previous two home matches the average crowd was 4,095, which is 19.3% below the overall average attendance.
In matches played before Christmas this season, home wins (23) well outnumbered home losses (16). Over the rest of the season away teams (32) won more than home teams (31). If we’re looking for a reason for the fall in crowds over the second half of this season – the post-Asian Cup slump – poor home form could be it.
This changing paradigm of home and away advantage presents a new challenge not only for coaches and other football operations staff, but also the administrators and promoters of the game. Their task must now be to build a core home supporter base that is less fickle – because the fact is that teams are not performing in their own back yards as they used to.
