Home advantage in the Premier League: what youth football can teach us

Once it became clear that the Premier League and Sky Bet Championship would return in empty stadiums I started to think about the implication for home advantage.

On Wednesday I gave some figures from competitions that have restarted in other countries. The figures varied widely from competition to competition, and for none was there a large sample of games.

In the middle of the range, home advantage had become effectively zero. Home teams had scored about the same number of goals as away teams. But the situation could change as players get used to performing without spectators.

Premier League and Championship clubs also have Under-23 and Under-21 teams who have played for a long time in competitions with few or no watchers. These might tell us something as well.

They involve much larger samples of games. Many of the players in them graduate to the Premier League and Championship. But only then do they know what it is like to walk out in front of a large crowd. So they might behave differently from senior professionals who play in front of 300 after playing in front of tens of thousands.

Premier League 2 and the Professional Development League are Under-23 competitions. Premier League 2 has two divisions. The first consists mostly of Premier League clubs, the second a mixture of Premier League and Championship clubs. The Professional Development League consists mostly of Championship clubs.

They have run in the same format for nearly four seasons – that is, since the start of 2016-17. In Premier League 2 there have been 503 games in Division 1 and 501 in Division 2, in the Professional Development League there have been 1,097 games.

Home advantage varied enormously from place to place and time to time. Sometimes it was worth nothing, other times it was worth more than in the well-attended Premier League and Championship.

Overall home teams averaged 1.5 points per game in Division 1 and 1.6 points per game in Division 2 of Premier League 2 and 1.6 points per game in the Professional Development League. They scored 52 per cent of all goals in Division 1 and 54 per cent of all goals in Division 2 of Premier League 2 and 55 per cent of all goals in the Professional Development League.

During the same period in both the Premier League and Championship home teams averaged 1.6 points per game and scored 56 per cent of all goals.

So altogether home advantage was worth less in the sparsely attended Under-23 competitions, but it was still worth something.

There is also an Under-18 Premier League competition, of which the same can be said. It has been running for nearly eight seasons – since the start of 2012-13. I have data for almost seven seasons – since the start of 2013-14. This covers 1,856 fixtures. Home teams averaged 1.6 points per game and scored 53 per cent of all goals.

There are no direct parallels for what is starting in the Premier League and what has already begun in some equivalent competitions in other countries. Over time growing data from them should become clearer, more consistent and more trustworthy. Meanwhile I will keep an open mind and try to be prepared for anything.

Time moves on for players as well as everyone else

The Premier League returns after three months away. It will not be quite the same – and not only because there are no longer any fans in stadiums.

The matches played on Wednesday were the first for 100 days. The interruption to this season because of the coronavirus pandemic was longer than the gap between some previous seasons.

There might be teams you think will play differently because they have little at stake, and you might be right about them or you might be wrong. There will be other teams who will get better or worse results that nobody could have guessed. Expect at least a bit of the unexpected.

Between seasons clubs buy some players and sell others. Even the players who do not move evolve to some extent, improving slightly or deteriorating slightly.

Every living organism is constantly changing. Otherwise it would be dead. A football team is composed of 11 players on the pitch, substitutes on the bench – nine for the rest of this season, of whom five can be used – plus a manager, coaches and backroom staff. It is a complex thing.

At any time during a season a team will be different than it was three months earlier.

Premier League teams have nine games to play. I went back through results from the last 20 completed seasons, 1999-2000 to 2018-2019. For each team in every season I compared results in batches of nine matches three months apart. Sometimes a team got the same number of points, sometimes a slightly different total, sometimes a very different total. Typically there was a difference of four or five points.

Differences could be explained partly by changes in the players, partly by changes in luck, and partly by shuffling the opponents, who would also have changed over the course of three months.

For the rest of this season most teams will be playing more frequently than usual. For everyone the weather will be hotter than it was three months ago. Many English summer days are not scorching hot, but some are. For all sorts of reasons, the Premier League will be different now than it was before.

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