Home advantage and the premier league
Introduction
The premier league has been running for about 20 years now, and the concept of home advantage is widely accepted within the league. But over the years sports reports have been reporting a drop in home advantage. According to the telegraph, A British newspaper there has been significant drop in percentage of home wins. But is this really true? So, Is there a correlation between home wins and the season
The charts
Here we have a table showing the total percentage of wins at home and away , and the total wins of all the teams in the premier league. This includes all seasons from 2010 to 2015. As you can see there is a significant increase in percentage in home wins over the away wins. The average difference between the two being 22%. So really there has been evidence of home advantage in the premier league and by a big margin of 22% on average.
The graphs
Here we have a graph of the home wins over the years. As the years go by you'll see a drop a home advantage, but this is still not enough to oppose the idea of home advantage. The average percentage of home advantage here is 61%.
The math
The data is linear, and a weak to strong negative slope. The y intercept is positive at around 80. The line of best fit formula, Y~mx+b, gives you the line of best fit a both. The y being the y of the data point, the m is what you want to find out, the x is the x axis of the point, and b is the Y intercept. The residuals are also very small and close to zero, suggesting that the line of best fit here has a moderate correlation coefficient, of -0.7 because it is negative, but when squared it gives 0.5 which shows that it is not too strong. The linear function here is Y=-1.3x+79.2. This then gives you the following.
Analaysis
The linear function here has a moderate correlation coefficient, because the data plots do vary by a bit. The slope is negative, meaning that home advantage is decreasing as the season go by. The direction is decreasing diagonally, and the correlation coefficient is strong, and the residuals are close to zero. The correlation coefficient is -0.7 which mean the correlation is negative, and when you square the number you get 0.5 which means the it is not very strong to the slope. The linear regression is every 1.3 season, the home wins percentage decreases by 0.7, so the season and home wins percentage are correlated. The shape of the scatter plot is linear diagonally. Using the linear regression when can predict that the current season of 2015/2016 the percentage of home wins will decrease by 1.3.
Correlation and Causation
The correlation is the relationship between two variables, and the data above can prove there is a correlation between home advantage and the season. The correlation is that the percentage of wins at home decreases as the seasons go by. The causation. There are many reasons why the number of home wins is decreasing. The home team is simply not scoring as many goals as they used to in their home pitch. Before tickets to football matches were expensive and if you were a supporter of an away you to drive all the way to the home teams pitches, and all that inconvenience and pricey tickets, led to home matches being mostly attended by locals who lived in the area. With all those rival fans cheering for your oppositions, and booing you the away team, it was hard to play as well as you can. But now, you go get around the country quicker than before, and tickets are cheaper, so you are now seeing more and more away fans, and this could affect the home team. Another factor is that there are more and more elite players coming. Before it was mostly local boys. But now stars from all over the world are coming to play in the premier league, improving teams in all aspects, from defense to attack making them harder to beat.
Conclusion
Sadly home advantage is slowly going extinct. Player are just playing as good on their home turf as good as they used to. The crowds cheering on the home team, and booing the away isn't having the same effect it used. Home advantage used to be something everyone all the teams believed in, and this would either boost or lower their morale depending on wether they were home or away. But now more and more away games are being won, and players are starting to doubt the theory, and the theory is starting to lose it power. Perhaps here in the premier league home advantage is a rare, and slowly disappearing idea, but maybe home advantage is still strong in other leagues. Hopefully.
Bibliography
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