Home advantage: how much it's worth, and what the pandemic proved about it

For more than a century, playing at home was treated as an obvious advantage in football, but rarely measured with any precision. That changed between 2020 and 2021: when the covid-19 pandemic emptied stadiums worldwide for months, researchers had, for the first time, a large-scale experiment to separate how much of home advantage comes from the crowd and how much comes from other factors.

How much home advantage is worth

Across seven European competitions, between the 2011/12 and 2020/21 seasons, 46% of games ended in a home win, 28% in a draw and only 26% in an away win, almost double the number of games won at home compared to away. In the Premier League, between 1992/93 and 2019/20, the historical ratio of home wins to away wins was nearly 1.7 to 1. In the Bundesliga, the last fully normal season before the pandemic, 2018/19, had home advantage measured at 57.63%.

The experiment the pandemic ran by accident

With fans banned from stadiums in 2020 and 2021, the effect showed up in the numbers almost immediately. A broad survey of European football showed away wins rising from 28.5% (2012-13) to 32.5% (2020-21), and in specific leagues, the jump was even bigger: in the French championship, from 27.9% to 36.8%; in the English Championship, from 30.3% to 36.7%; in the German championship, the home win rate fell from 45.1% to 36.5%.

One study measured home advantage at 17.8% with fans, and at just 2.6% in matches behind closed doors, a difference statistically equivalent to zero. The goal advantage collapsed from 0.50 to 0.11 per game. A separate, independent study of 4,356 matches across 12 leagues in 8 countries found a similar drop: from 0.39 to 0.23 extra points per game at home, and from 0.29 to 0.17 extra goals, alongside fewer corners, fewer shots and fewer shots on target for the home side.

In the Bundesliga specifically, home advantage measured at 54.35% in matches with fans (223 games) fell to 44.1% in ghost games (the final 83 games of the 2019/20 season), enough to invert the home side's record, which went from winning more than it lost to losing more than it won in that final stretch. In Italy, comparing the 2018/19 and 2020/21 seasons, Serie B's home advantage fell from 62.8% to 56.1%.

In the Premier League 2020/21, played almost entirely without fans, home advantage shrank 44% compared to the pre-pandemic average, enough to nearly wipe out the gap between playing at home and away. The effect was much weaker in England's lower divisions, which fell by between 18% and 29%.

Why this happens: three tested hypotheses

The most studied explanation is crowd-induced referee bias. One study found that, with a full stadium, the away team receives more fouls called against it, more yellow cards and more red cards than the home side, a gap that nearly disappears entirely in matches without fans. Another survey put an exact number on it: without a crowd, home teams received on average 0.78 more fouls called against them and 0.11 more yellow cards per match, compared with equivalent games with fans.

The second hypothesis, travel fatigue for the visiting side, lost strength over time. A 57-year study of the Bundesliga (1964-2020) found a statistically significant effect of the distance travelled by the away team on home advantage in the 1964-1989 period, but that effect nearly halved and stopped being statistically relevant between 1990 and 2020.

The third hypothesis, familiarity with the pitch, produced perhaps the most surprising finding. A study looked at derbies played at the SAME stadium, Milan vs Inter, Roma vs Lazio, between 1988-89 and 2003-04, and found no advantage at all for the side designated as home team: on average, it earned only 1.14 points per game, against 1.42 for the visitor, even with the full local crowd inside the stadium. In normal matches for the same teams, against opponents of similar strength, home advantage reappeared strongly: 1.64 points per game at home against 0.91 away.

The recovery once fans returned

As soon as crowds returned to stadiums, home advantage came back too. In the Premier League, the ratio of home wins to away wins rose to 1.26 in 2021/22 and, by 2022/23, had returned to its pre-pandemic historical level. In the Bundesliga, the 2020/21 season, with a partial fan ban, already showed home advantage very close to the level recorded in 2018/19; the following season, with varying crowd capacities, the effect followed a U-shaped relationship with stadium occupancy, fuller stands, bigger advantage.

How the advantage varies between leagues today

With crowds back, the size of home advantage still differs from league to league. Among Europe's five biggest leagues, La Liga is where playing at home matters most, with 62.68% of points earned at home in the current season; the Bundesliga relies least on home advantage among the five, at 57.08%.

Looking at home win rate (not points) across 29 leagues worldwide, between 2022 and 2026, England's Championship, the country's second tier, leads with 47.17%, even higher than the Premier League. The Chinese Super League has the lowest rate among the 29, at 39.79%, a gap of more than seven percentage points between the top and bottom of the ranking.

In Brazil, the 2026 Brasileirão Série A reached its 27th round with home teams winning 47% of matches, against 29% draws and 24% away wins, figures in the same range as Europe's biggest leagues. An academic study using ten years of Brasileirão data (1998 to 2007, 3,836 games) had already found that clubs won, on average, 25% more often at home than away.

The extreme case: altitude

No single factor produces as large an advantage as an altitude gap. In a hypothetical Bolivia vs Brazil match, with the 3,695-metre altitude difference between La Paz and sea level, the Bolivian home side has an estimated win probability of 82.5%, against just 53.7% when both teams play at the same altitude. It is the same logic, taken to an extreme, that explains why South American national teams have historically been reluctant to play qualifiers in La Paz or Quito.

The full picture, then, is more complicated than "the crowd pushes the team": part of home advantage genuinely comes from support in the stands, and vanishes almost entirely without it, but another part comes from things the crowd doesn't even need to be there to explain, like knowing every detail of the pitch, or simply breathing thinner air than the opponent.