Home Advantage: Blessing and Curse

Humans are no doubt territorial. This territoriality manifests itself in our athletic endeavors also, as a well-known phenomenon called the home advantage. Simply put, home advantage means the persistence of home teams winning a majority of games. This phenomenon has been around as long as team competition has been in existence but did not receive scientific study until 1977. Schwartz and Barsky (1977) did the first psychological study of home advantage. Given that this phenomenon indeed exists, Schwartz and Barsky intended to find why it exists. Before this study, hypotheses abounded as to the cause of home advantage (travel fatigue, lack of familiarity with the home playing area, crowd noise, etc.). Schwartz and Barsky studied the four most popular sports in North America: football, baseball, hockey and basketball. Football was studied at the professional and collegiate levels, baseball at the Major League level, hockey at the National Hockey League level, and basketball at a regional collegiate level. All four sports were studied at home and away venues; basketball was also studied at neutral venues. Strong versus weak teams was studied for baseball and hockey. Small, medium and large audience sizes were studied for baseball. This study yielded five substantial results. First, home advantage is most pronounced in basketball and hockey, and least in football and baseball. Second, home team advantage is mostly attributable to audience support. These two findings complement each other because crowd noise is louder for the indoor venues of basketball and hockey than the outdoor venues of football and baseball. More specifically, basketball enjoys a stronger home advantage than hockey and baseball suffers a weaker home advantage than football. The reason for this could be that a basketball court is smaller than a hockey rink, allowing more cheering fans into the arena. Also, at most ballparks, nearly half of the seats are beyond first and

References: Acker, J. C. (1997). Location variations in professional football. Journal of Sport Behavior, 20, 247-259. Baumeister, R. F. (1985). The championship choke. Psychology Today, 19, 48-52. Schwartz, B., & Barsky, S. F. (1977). The home advantage. Social Forces, 55, 641-661.