It comes up again and again, and is a culture clash that is not limited to but particularly prevalent between US and European perspectives.
US sports tend to have less meaningful "regular" seasons, which just seed "play-offs", which themselves often have "Best of X series".
All of that is designed to maximise the chance that the "winner" and the "best team" are aligned.
Meanwhile in UK competitions, an entire yearly competition can be decided by a bad 90 minutes, such as ManU losing to York City, something the fans of both sides likely still remember 30 or so years later.
This argument frequently plays out in e-sports, which still try to find a good balance between the two, with the "best players should win" crowd wanting anti-climatic double-elimination, and the "Let's have more meaningful games" crown preferring single elimination.
"Competitions should be designed to find who the best team is" is a statement that many would agree with, but "Competitions should provide excitement and allow for upsets" is one I think is just as important, if not more so.
Another similar culture-clash is the concept of relegation versus franchising, as well as the concept of "drafting" in a (failed?) attempt to even out the competition.
In the meantime the NBA has had 7 different champions the last 7 years.
Except if you look at the NFL - the most popular sport in the US by far - the playoffs are "Best of 1". The NFL also enforces very close parity which gives a lot of unpredictability. You combine those and you get a lot of upsets.
You can compare it to how it is done in medicine. Imagine a match between a drug and migraine. Would we only do a single test to determine if the drug "wins" against migraine? Of course not. We do many tests and determine a p-value. We can do the same thing in soccer.
Now, of course we cannot do this in a real tournament (it would take too long), but we can draw conclusions from such a test, or several such tests.
What is really interesting and far more worth studying is that there are some very fun outliers - clubs like Bodø/Glimt who have a miniscule annual budget but have overperformed in European competition in recent years. They reached the semi-finals of the Europa League - beating Lazio, Olympiacos, Porto along the way - and in previous years have had similarly deep runs where they battered Roma 6-1 and beat Besiktas and Celtic both home and away. All of the teams I mentioned Bodo/Glimr defeating will have an annual budget that is 10 time theirs (or more) and will frequently make high profile international signings, while Bodo spend frugally and have a predominantly (if not all) domestic squad.
I mentioned Manchester United and Tottenham - they're also outliers worth studying, but in another way. They were both utterly woeful in the league last season despite having astronomical budgets.
If you can crack what causes a Bodø/Glimt, a Manchester United or a Tottenham then you'd be a very valuable addition to the backroom staff of any football club with a desire to punch above their weight...
If heads and tails play many games against each other, then the probability for tails to win the overall "tournament" goes to 1. But football is a sport of relatively few games in cup tournaments and low scores (this relatively high variance). This is very conducive to upsets even if we assume perfectly independent probabilities.
Compare to Basketball play offs, with best of 7 Series and on the order of 100 "goals" per game.
That's maybe why in football the league title is more prestigious than the cups, while in basketball the regular season is not considered anywhere near as important as the play offs.
Tell that to supporters of Scottish Cup Winners 2024/25 Aberdeen FC (I am a supporter of Scottish Cup Winners 2024/25 Aberdeen FC) :D
You don't want it too low, because then quality becomes meaningless. You do want to give good results to good teams. But there is also don't want it to be perfect - you want some unpredictability in sports. You don't want every match to be a foregone conclusion, and you want every supporter to be able to have some reasonable hope.
There is some data suggesting that one of the reasons that English football is popular is because it's low scoring. This increases the chance that random variation gives an "incorrect" result. In this hypothesis, unpredictability adds excitement and builds popularity.
The NFL achieves similar results a different way - various forms of consistency and negative feedback (salary cap, draft order, schedule) to keep teams very close in ability. This means that small differences like a game plan for a particular week can regularly affect results, and keeps predictability low.
The England game a couple of nights ago. On paper England were better before hand, but Italy were winning until the last minute of injury time. Some England fans had already left the stadium, then in goes the goal, then extra time, then just as it looks like another horrendous penalty shootout there's a foul in the box and England take it, then the goalie stops it, but then it goes in.
Certainly a rollercoaster for both sets of fans.
Perhaps a neural network can be trained on a lot more data to make predictions for each match, and I imagine who gamble a lot have probably done things like this already. But then you don't have a number to optimize.
I'd not be surprised to hear that this is complete nonsense, but it's a memorable story. A simpler version of this story is that people have steadily drunk less since WW2 when going out, and you're more likely to go out when away from home.
Certainly athletes have got more professional, and less likely to drink at all, or during the season, or the night before a game.
I was also going to hypothesize that players are significantly mentally equipped to cope with away pressures and their tactical shape stays more consistent regardless of being home or away.
As for the time trend, I suspect professionalization was happening slowly, then quickly. Of course there have been fully paid footballers for a long time, but if you look at stories from the 80s and early 90s, the guys would still smoke and eat burgers. It's only in recent decades that the stops have been pulled out, and everyone started doing full on sports science to maximize every chance.
Having absolutely everyone optimized physically also means you can explore strategies that used to be impossible. If you know you're at 80% due to traveling, your gegenpress is going to be a bit less attractive.
- plough the pitch to kneecap expensive teams with running/passing games
- narrow the pitch dimensions to minimise fancy wide plays
- grow the grass long and pour sand in the corners so long balls less likely to go out
He then recruited the tallest forwards he could and the strategy was simple, hoof it to the big fellas up front. None of this running/passing nonsense that requires money/talent.
I expect regulations might have improved since then...
The Premier League & the Champions League are money spinning ventures for a reason.
What you say still happens in International Cricket, but not usually for club tournaments like The 100 or the Indian Premier League.
Feel for Frank, but this wasn't the top clubs & best players playing in the Premier League.
Debatable playoffs have the same reach as PL & CL matches between top clubs.
> daft
I don't doubt that the home team may make changes to their advantage, but I don't think the broadcasters would particularly like it if the pitch absolutely destroyed any chance at good entertainment. In International Cricket, the equivalent would be preparing the pitch to the home team's strengths (which went horribly wrong for India, the home team, in the 2023 World Cup Final, which was as drab as they come).
'In 1918, an article in Ladies Home Journal advised: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”'
https://www.ncaa.com/video/football/2014-09-12/traditions-io...
I don't think Everton's home record can really get that much worse when they move into their new stadium next season though.
Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.
When Mourinho started he brought in a sports psychologist who made the dressing rooms slightly heated with light pink walls and a comforting atmosphere. They ended up going 2+ years without a loss at home after that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXmv7VK_110
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aTHc9Xinb6U (uncensored: https://www.tiktok.com/@bunch_amateurs/video/733659771889629... )
But enough about the English Premier League!
And keep players in condition for when the crowds could come back without too much risk of death.
Those are both pretty good reasons to keep having the games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
While FIFA recommends a specific size for pro teams, a legal pitch can have widths range from 46 to 91 metres and lengths of 91 to 119 metres. That’s a possible ratio range of 1:1 to 1:2.58.
I could imagine that stadium upgrades have meant that pitches don’t have as much variation as in the past too.
https://soccerfeed.net/premier-league-pitch-sizes/
https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/pitch-sizes-of-stadiums-in-...
It also feels relevant to note that air pressure plays a role, and that players have an easier time hitting home runs in high altitude places like Colorado, so the game isn't the same everywhere.
Parking sucks, traffic sucks, the seating is cramped, and the food is expensive, but it's idiosyncratic, weird, and not designed to create an experience to within an inch of its life. Love that ballpark, and I say that as a Guardians fan by birth.
https://www.overthemonster.com/2025/7/23/24472798/fenway-par...
I think the potential confounders (training was disrupted for months, games were played in summer months, season was compressed, etc.) make that "only" do far too much work here.
- England is an homogeneous country in terms of geography. There is no 40C degree temperature difference between north/south clubs. Playing in weather conditions one is not used to can affect the away team.
- England is also a small country. The away team can arrive at the stadium within the day. Not only it means they are better rested but also home fans cannot bother them at the hotel making noise, throwing fireworks, etc. preventing them from sleeping.
- The FA is not as corrupt. Sure, certain teams can get away with playing dirty, but in general referees will show red card to a home team player, or call out a penalty for the away team.
- Less threatening environment at the stadium, both for the away team players and the referees. Nobody is throwing food, beer or anything at the players during the game, and hooligans will not try to harm the referee if the home team loses.
Also pretty flat. No 1000m+ altitude differences. Competing in Colorado suuuucks.
For me, their findings were vindicated during the pandemic, when HFA all but disappeared. My guess is more recent decay might be because of VAR and goal line technology, which have become more integral to the game in recent seasons.
You could probably do some minor rules tweak to get rid of it or reduce it further - but I think it's actually a good thing to have a noticeable but small home advantage. You have the same number of home and away games so it evens out in the regular season. So a little nudge for the team that everyone bought tickets to watch seems alright.
I think it's desirable in the playoffs too, even if your goal is for the best team to win the tournament, not just from an entertainment perspective. We deliberately stack the playoffs for the teams that did best in the regular season, both by seeding and by who gets home advantage. There's lots of entertainment reasons this makes sense to me, but it also makes sense to me in terms of making the best team most likely to win. The playoffs are usually less data than the regular season. So this is a way of letting the regular season data have more of an influence on the outcome of the championship.
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