why are football matches “at home” or as “visitors” treated like an advantage or disadvantage?

Question

is there any way in which this fact could affect a match by itself?

In: 8717

Answer 1

The refs do get influenced by the crowd, but it’s not intentional. Also, there was a study done about soccer matches. The researchers found that the home field advantage was muted in stadiums that had a track around the pitch, presumably because the fans were farther back from the action.

https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/football-freakonomics-how-advantageous-is-home-field-advantage-and-why/

>So if these popular explanations don’t have much explanatory power for home-field advantage, what does?
In a word: the refs. Moskowitz and Wertheim found that home teams essentially get slightly preferential treatment from the officials, whether it’s a called third strike in baseball or, in soccer, a foul that results in a penalty kick. (It’s worth noting that a soccer referee has more latitude to influence a game’s outcome than officials in other sports, which helps explain why the home-field advantage is greater in soccer, around the world, than in any other pro sport.)

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Moskowitz and Wertheim also make clear, however, an important nuance: official bias is quite likely involuntary.
What does this mean? It means that officials don’t consciously decide to give the home team an advantage — but rather, being social creatures (and human beings) like the rest of us, they assimilate the emotion of the home crowd and, once in a while, make a call that makes a whole lot of close-by, noisy people very happy.

>One of the most compelling (and cleverest) arguments in favor of this theory comes from a research paper by Thomas Dohmen about home-field advantage in Germany’s Bundesliga, the country’s top soccer league.
Dohmen found that home-field advantage was smaller in stadiums that happened to have a running track surrounding the soccer pitch, and larger in stadiums without a track.
Why?
Apparently, when the crowd sits closer to the field, the officials are more susceptible to getting caught up in the home-crowd emotion. Or, as Dohmen puts it: The social atmosphere in the stadium leads referees into favoritism although being impartial is optimal for them to maximize their re-appointment probability.