Winning more without improving skills. Familiarity factors and their effects on the home advantage in team sports during the Covid-19 pandemic
This thesis was written in order to complete my master Marketing Analytics at Tilburg University. I had chosen this master following my love for data and analytics. Both of which were a big part of this thesis as well. I am glad I could use the knowledge I gathered during the master in order to write a thesis contributing to the literature on home advantage in team sports.
My love for data might be as big as my love for sports. The excitement people experience during sports matches is immense. People often say that winners (especially after underdog wins) can not be predicted. I think we indeed currently have too little data to accurately predict sports winners. However, I would like to dive more into this topic to find out just how much you can predict. I have always been fascinated by the spirit of sports players, and experiencing a home advantage has a big influence on a player's spirit. Therefore, and due to the unique situation Covid-19 gave, this was the field I wanted to write my master thesis in.
For this thesis, information from three different data sources are combined. Match-based statistics are collected from a paid API. The API provided the information on which teams played, who won and with how many goals difference, which players played, who was the captain and who was the coach, and at which venue the match was played (including its location and grass type), and the number of attendance. The additional information on team and coach factors was scrapped from the website Transfermarkt.com. This website contains the date a player/coach joined the team and the value of the player/coach. If the value of a player or the starting date could not be obtained, the player received the average value of the lineup of that match. Lastly, to calculate the travel factors, the API of Bing was used. This API calculates the distance between the home and away teams stadiums, the time it would take to travel from the away to the home stadium by car, and the change in altitude between the home and away stadium. The web scrapers of Transfermarkt are included in the folder 'code creating dataset'.
The global sports market is worth more than 400 billion U.S. dollars (Statista, 2019). A single match outcome can cost or gain a club millions in prize money. In addition, winning teams gain more exposure (Gibbs et al., 2014), and the purchase intention towards their sponsors increases (Ngan et al., 2011). One way of improving the winning chances, is by increasing the home advantage, which is the intrinsic benefit that home teams have during matches in their own accommodation compared to when they are the visiting team. This thesis aimed to further uncover which factors drive the home advantage in team sports. This thesis looked at the home advantage in six professional European soccer competitions of matches without a crowd due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the crowd has been found in earlier studies as one of the most important factors of the home advantage, the impact of other factors is central in this work. During the recent Corona pandemic, spectators were not allowed during sports games. Therefore, when the crowd is not attending the matches, smaller factors that explain the home advantage could become more visible. This thesis reanalyzes the effect of facility familiarity on home advantage since previous research had contradictory findings. Using a moderated regression analysis on 1,785 soccer matches, it was found that teams playing on an artificial turf field rather than a grass field during their home matches had a bigger home advantage. In addition, teams playing on uncommonly small fields during their home matches had a lower home advantage. This thesis also researched the influence of player familiarity on home advantage. However, no effect of player familiarity on home advantage has been found. In addition, no effect of the familiarity of the coach on home advantage has been found. The familiarity of the assistant coach did, however, have a positive effect on the home advantage. These findings are of importance to soccer clubs, competition organizers, and sponsors. Soccer clubs can strategically adjust their accommodation to increase their home advantage by investing in artificial turf fields and avoid playing on uncommonly small fields during home matches. Competition organizers now have evidence that the allowed changes in fields give some teams an advantage and could therefore consider equalizing the playing field by tightening the regulations. Lastly, sponsors could benefit from the findings of this thesis by considering the above-stated findings to help pick a team to sponsor with a higher home advantage. This increases the chance of that team to win more games and thus, increases the exposure for the sponsors and the subsequent purchase intention towards products of the sponsors.