Home advantage
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In team sports, a team playing at their own stadium or arena are known as the home team. The other team is known as the visiting team or the away team, and can be said to be on the road. Teams typically play their home games in or near their home region; they will generally have half their total games at home in a season.
In many sports, such designations may also apply to games played at a neutral site; as the rules of various sports make different provisions for home and visiting teams. In baseball, for instance, the team designated the home team bats second in each inning, whereas the "visiting" team bats first.
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[edit] Advantages of being the home team
In most team sports where the concept of home and away stadiums is found the home team is considered to have a significant advantage over the visitors. Due to this, many important games (such as playoff or elimination matches) in many sports have special rules for determining what match is played where. In football (soccer), matches with two legs, one played in each team's home pitch, are common; it is also common to hold important games at a neutral site. In many team sports in North America (including baseball, basketball, and ice hockey), playoff series are often held, with a nearly equal number of games at each team's site; as it is usually beneficial to have an odd number of matches in a series (to prevent ties), the final home game is often awarded to the team that had the most success over the regular season.
Home field advantage is especially pronounced in NCAA Division I Football, where teams like USC, Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Nebraska, Florida and many others win consistently at home. That can be attributed to the fact that many of the largest football stadiums in America are college stadiums, such as Michigan Stadium which seats 107,501, about 35,000 more than most NFL stadiums. However, teams that are nearby may have less of a home field advantage. Such examples may be UCLA-USC or Cal-Stanford, where the visiting team's fans often equal or exceed the home crowd and the only effect the visiting team has is they have to wear their road uniforms and play on a nearby field. Sometimes during bowl season, a team will happen to play a bowl game in their home stadium and sometimes be designated as the visiting team in their own home stadium, and thus, receives the home field advantage despite not being the home team. On the high school level, where schools often share stadiums, when the co-tenants play each other, one school manages to pick up a not so rare, but advantageous road game in their home stadium. On the professional level, several teams either get to play road games in their home stadiums or play a road game nearby. When the Jets and the Giants of the NFL meet, whoever the visiting team is gets an extra game at their home stadium. A similar situation occurs when the Lakers and Clippers of the NBA play each other. Other series where teams get to stay close to home on the road include: (NFL) Raiders-49ers, Ravens-Redskins (MLB) A's-Giants, Dodgers-Angels, Mets-Yankees, Cubs-White Sox, Cubs-Brewers, Orioles-Nationals (NHL) Islanders-Rangers-Devils, Ducks-Kings, oilers-flames, Senators-Maple Leafs, and in the NBA, Knicks-Nets.
The home advantage is often clear, especially during UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup home and away legs, with the potentially weaker teams beating the favourites when playing at home. The World Cup victories of Uruguay (1930), Italy (1934), England (1966), Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and France (1998) are all in part contributed to the fact that the World Cup was held in the winner's country. A 2006 study by The Times found that in the English Premiership, a home team can be expected to score 37.29% more goals than the away team, though this changes depending on the quality of the teams involved.
As recognition for the difficulty in winning away matches, cup competitions in football (soccer) often invoke the away goals rule. Away goals can also sometimes be used to separate teams level on points and goal difference in league competitions.
[edit] Causes of home team advantage
For games at home, the team will have the advantage of playing with their first choice uniform/kit, rather than their alternate colours. A team's identity is often partly or mostly based on its home colours (for example, Urawa Reds of Japan). In Major League Baseball, by tradition a team's home uniform has the team name on it (i.e. "Twins," "Mets," "Braves") and is typically white in color, while its away uniform has the name of its home city, state or region on it ("Minnesota," "New York," "Atlanta") and is grey or light blue, although the St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies have always followed an opposing tradition by wearing the team nickname on both the home and away jerseys. A recent innovation in baseball is the "Sunday" alternate uniform, which is the same color for both home and away games. Regardless, all members of a team wear the same uniform (home, away or alternate) in each game. In one early-season 2006 game, the Minnesota Twins, in the middle of a vicious slump, played in their batting practice uniforms.
The stadium or arena will typically be filled with home supporters, who are sometimes described as being as valuable as an extra player for the home team. While the visiting team's fans may travel to attend the game, home team fans will generally have better access to tickets, and only the home team's season ticket holders will be able to use their tickets (in sports in which season tickets are sold). In some sports, sections of the stadium will be reserved for supporters of one team or the other (to prevent fan violence); the home team's fans will have the bulk of the seating available to them. In addition, stadium/arena light shows, sound effects, fireworks, cheerleaders, and other means to enliven the crowd will be in support of the home team. Stadium announcers in England will emphasise the home team's goals and lineup to acclaim from the crowd; in contrast they will quickly and quietly broadcast away team information.
There are often cheerleaders, particularly in America, and signs promoting the team. Programmes produced by the home team may be sold in and around the stadium, and there may be club shops selling team-related merchandise.[citation needed]
[edit] Disadvantages
However, in some rare instances, rules may work against a home team. For example, in high school football, the National Federation of State High School Associations, the governing body of high school sports, the rules require the home team to wear their dark uniforms. This actually works against the idea of home field advantage and forces teams who have early season home games in the south to wear heat absorbing dark uniforms under the hot sun while the visitors can get away with wearing white heat reflecting jerseys. In Massachusetts and Texas, the home team can wear white jerseys for high school football games, since those two states play under NCAA rules for football, which allow the home team to wear their whites with the consent of the visiting team (see below).
A few college football teams traditionally wear white uniforms at home in football, most notably the LSU Tigers and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (although Tech currently wears gold jerseys at home under coach Chan Gailey). NCAA rules requiring the visiting team to consent to LSU wearing white at home can hurt them when they host an early season daytime home game, although when LSU faces another Southeastern Conference team, the NCAA rule does not apply, because SEC rules dictate that the home team will be allowed its choice of jersey color in conference game without prior approval of the visiting team. Florida twice took advantage of this rule under former coach Steve Spurrier and wore white at home against LSU, forcing LSU to wear its purple jerseys in a daytime game in 2000 won by the Gators, 41-9.
[edit] Factors of home advantage
The most-commonly cited factors of home advantage are usually ones whose advantageous effects are difficult to measure and thus even their existence is debated. Most of these are psychological in nature, such as familiarity with the playing grounds, the ability for participants to lodge in their homes rather than in a hotel, less likelihood of travel immediately prior to the game, and the psychological support of the fans in attendance.
Other factors, however, are easier to detect and can have noticeable effects on the outcome of the game. In American football, for instance, the crowd often makes as much noise as it can when the visiting team is about to run a play. This can make it very difficult for the visiting team's quarterback to call audible play changes or for any player to hear the snap count. In basketball, when a visiting player is making a free throw, home fans behind the backboard typically wave their arms or other objects in an attempt to break the visiting player's focus on making the shot.
There are also factors having to do with players being accustomed to peculiar environmental conditions of their home area. The city of Denver, being a mile (1609 m) above sea level, has thinner air; enough so that it affects the stamina of athletes whose bodies are not used to it. Although baseball is less aerobically demanding than most other sports, high altitude affects that sport's gameplay in several important ways. The reduced air resistance of Denver allows fly balls to travel about 10% farther than at sea level, and also reduces the ability of pitchers to throw effective breaking balls. Consequently, the Colorado Rockies have a very large home advantage, with a 30% better home then away record. This anomaly has been countered with Colorado's innovative use of humidors to keep the baseballs from drying out. [1] The national football (soccer) team of Bolivia also enjoys the advantage of playing at high altitude: at home during World Cup qualifiers at the even more extreme 3600 m (11,800 ft) altitude of La Paz they have even been known to beat Brazil, a team regularly ranked number one in the FIFA World Rankings.
Sometimes the unique attributes of a stadium create a home-field advantage; the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome's unique off-white Teflon-coated roof traps and reflects noise to such an extent that it can become distracting or even harmful, this combined with the color of the roof can cause opposing players to commit more errors in the Dome than in other ballparks. The parquet floor at the Boston Celtics' home of TD Banknorth Garden (previously named FleetCenter), which was moved intact from the team's former home of Boston Garden, contains numerous defects, which are said to give the Celtics, who are more likely to be familiar with the playing surface, an advantage. During the 1985-1986 season, the Larry Bird-led Celtics posted a home court record of 40-1 (being beaten only by the Portland Trail Blazers); this record still stands in the NBA.
Lastly, there exist some advantages for the home team which are actually written into the rules of the game. In the National Hockey League, during stoppages of play, the home team is allowed to make player substitutions after the visiting team, allowing them to obtain favorable player matchups. In baseball, the home team gets to bat last in each inning. If the game goes into extra innings, this can yield very real advantages when deciding strategies regarding base-stealing and sacrifice hits. In addition, in interleague games in Major League Baseball (including the World Series), the home league's rules concerning the designated hitter are followed; this puts AL teams at a disadvantage when they play in NL parks, as AL pitchers are typically not used to having to bat.
The culture of the country influences how many supporters of the away team turn up to games; for example in Spain, very few away football (soccer) supporters will be found unless they live near the away game, the teams playing are rivals, or the game is vital to their team's season. In England, however, almost all clubs have travelling supporters' clubs and a postponed game is a great source of annoyance to fans who have travelled over 100 miles only to find their trip was a waste of time.
While even the best teams of any particular sports league usually perform better at home, mediocre teams generally find most or all of their few wins at home. Teams who face each other two or more times usually fare better at home, winning or losing by a larger or smaller margin, respectively, than away.
[edit] Gaining/losing home-field advantage
During the regular season for a sport, in the interest of fairness, schedulers try to ensure that each team plays an equal number of home and away games. Thus, having home-field advantage for any particular regular-season game is largely due to random chance. However, in playoffs, home advantage is usually given to the team with the better regular-season record. One exception to this is Major League Baseball, which since 2003 has awarded home-field advantage in the World Series to the team representing the league which won the All-Star Game that year, to help raise interest in the All-Star Game after a tie in 2002. Prior to 2003, home-field advantage alternated each year between the National League and the American League. In MLB's first and second round of playoffs, home-field advantage is given to the team with the best record if both teams are division champions, and to the division champion if one of the teams is a wild card. For the first round in the NFL and NHL playoffs, home advantage is given to the team with a higher seed (which may or may not have the better record). The NBA is the only league that has home advantage based solely on which team has the best record (using various tiebreakers to settle the question should the teams finish with identical records). Rugby union's Heineken Cup also uses a seeding system to determine home advantage in the quarterfinals (though not in the semifinals, where the nominal "home" teams[1] are determined by a blind draw).
In many sports, playoffs are comprised of a series of games played between two teams. These series are usually a best-of-5 or best-of-7 format, where the first team to win 3 or 4 games, respectively, wins the playoff. Since these best-of series always involve an odd number of games, it is impossible to guarantee that an equal number of games will be played at each team's home venue. As a result, one team must be scheduled to have one more home game than the other. This team is said to have home-field advantage for that playoff series.
During the course of these playoff series, however, sports announcers or columnists will sometimes mention a team "gaining" or "losing" home-field advantage. This can happen after a visiting team has just won a game in the series. In playoff series format, the home-field advantage is said to exist for whichever team would win the series if all remaining games in the series are won by the home team for that game. Therefore, it is possible for a visiting team to win a game and, hence, gain home-field advantage. This is somewhat similar to the concept of losing serve in tennis.
As an example, suppose that a blue team and red team are about to play a best-of-seven series against each other. Four games will be played at blue's venue, while three will be played at red's venue. If the home team were to win each game, then blue would win four games, red would win three games, and blue would win the series, so we say that blue has the home-field advantage. However, suppose that the first game is played at blue's venue and the visiting red team wins. Red now has one win, and there are three games remaining at each venue. If the home team wins each of the remaining games, then red will have won four games, while blue will have won three. Since red would win the series in such a scenario, it is said that red has taken home-field advantage away from blue.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Heineken Cup rules regarding semifinal venues are:
- The venue cannot be a team's normal home ground.
- It must have a capacity of at least 20,000.
- It must be held in the same country as the team drawn as "home". However, exceptions have been allowed. Most notably, French club Biarritz Olympique, located less than 20 km from the Spanish border, have been allowed to take a semifinal across the border to Estadio Anoeta in Donostia-San Sebastián, the nearest ground to Biarritz with a suitable capacity.
