ABSTRACT
Soccer teams in balanced competitions achieving better results when playing at home than away from home, is a consistent finding. The mean home winning advantages of up to over 60 per cent have been reported to exist in international soccer (Pollard, 1986, 2006a). In addition, soccer's home advantage is known to differ according to long-term trends (Pollard and Pollard, 2005) and geographical variation (Pollard, 2006b). However, despite much research, the causes of home advantage are not yet fully understood. Different factors such as crowd support, familiarity, territoriality and special playing tactics (Nevill et al., 2002; Pollard, 1986, 2006b; Tenga et al., 2010) have been considered, but studies have so far failed to isolate a dominant factor explaining the home advantage in soccer. Pollard (2006a) suggested that the complexity of this phenomenon is due to the fact that many factors are associated with home advantage in soccer and that some of these factors seem to interact with each other.
