Myth busted: No such thing as a home or away specialist in football

Brentford have won 26 points more at home than away. So have Crewe. After 21 home games and 21 away games the difference between home and away points for a Football League team is typically ten. By their standards Brentford and Crewe have done unusually well at home and unusually badly away.

Should we be sweeter than we might otherwise have been on Crewe at home to Yeovil in Sky Bet League Two, and more wary than we might otherwise have been about Brentford away to Millwall in the Championship? No.

In League One, you will find, Wimbledon have registered unusually poor results at home while Bristol Rovers have registered unusually fine results away. But does that make a home win less likely and an away win more likely when Wimbledon host Rovers? Again the answer is no.

You will often hear people say this team are home specialists or that team are away specialists, by which they mean the first team gain a greater than normal advantage from playing on their own ground while the second team suffer a smaller than normal disadvantage from playing on other grounds.

With the greatest of respect, these people are wrong. There is no such thing in football as a home or away specialist. At least, not in the sense that the term is commonly understood by football fans or football bettors.

Over any given period there will be some teams who gain unusually good results on their own ground, and some teams who gain unusually good results at other venues, but this happens for no reason, completely by accident.

Over the next period, generally speaking, the so-called home specialists will no longer produce the results expected of home specialists and the so-called away specialists will no longer produce the results expected of away specialists.

Backing teams who appeared to be home or away specialists in the past to perform again like home or away specialists in the future is a betting strategy that ultimately will yield horrible losses.

Let me try to give you some examples of what I mean.

Academics from the universities of Wolverhampton and Portsmouth studied how the difference between home and away results varied from one season to the next for a paper in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise. “We correlated the team home advantages between seasons,” they wrote, “and we found no significant correlation.”

What is true for one season and the next is also true for sections of the same season.

I studied the difference between home and away points for Football League teams at the start and end of the last 20 seasons, 1998-99 to 2017-18.

As teams played 46 games it seemed convenient to divide each season into two parts – the first 11 home games and first 11 away games, then the last 11 home games and last 11 away games. That left the 12th – or middle – home and away games, which I ignored simply for the sake of balance.

And this is what I found. The average difference between home and away points in each part of a season was five. If the difference between home and away points for a team in the first part of a season was greater than five, then the difference in the second part tended to be five. And also the other way round – if the difference between home and away points for a team in the first part of a season was less than five, then difference in the second part tended to be five.

Consider, for example, teams for whom the difference between home and away points in the first 11 home and away games was ten, the sort of teams who might have been dubbed home specialists. For them, the average difference between home and away points over the last 11 home and away games was five.

Or teams for whom the difference between home and away points in the first 11 home and away games was zero. Those are the sort of teams who might have been called away specialists. And for them also the average difference between home and away points over the last 11 home and away games was five.

Over the years I have conducted several other investigations, and from all of them I have drawn broadly similar conclusions. There is no evidence to suggest there is any such thing as a home or away specialist, if by home or away specialist we mean that a team who have achieved abnormally good or bad results at a particular type of venue in the past will do so again in the future.

Belief in the existence of home and away specialists is deeply ingrained in football. But it is wrong. So there is no need, after all, to scratch our head about the League Two fixture between Tranmere and Forest Green. This season Tranmere have achieved unusually good results at home and Forest Green have achieved unusually good results away.

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