RESEARCH ARTICLE


Home Advantage in Football: A Current Review of an Unsolved Puzzle



Richard Pollard *
Cloverfield Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90405, U.S.A.


Article Metrics

CrossRef Citations:
107
Total Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 378
Abstract HTML Views: 3408
PDF Downloads: 1473
Total Views/Downloads: 5259
Unique Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 194
Abstract HTML Views: 1970
PDF Downloads: 1129
Total Views/Downloads: 3293



Creative Commons License
© 2008 Pollard et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Cloverfield Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90405, U.S.A.; Tel: +1 310 396-6715; E-mail: richwpollard@yahoo.com


Abstract

The existence of home advantage in football is a well known and well documented fact. However the precise causes and the way in which they affect performance are still not clear. A comprehensive review is made of published research under the main hypothesized explanations for home advantage in football which are: crowd effects, travel effects, familiarity, referee bias, territoriality, specific tactics, rule factors and psychological factors. Their interactions, and other factors that need to be taken into account when investigating home advantage, are considered.