Home team advantage
Home team advantage is a well-documented phenomenon in sports.
So, in this article, I will consider the home team effect in the football game.
How to consider home team effect
There are many ways to consider the home team effect.
The most common way is to add a constant value to the home team's rating.
For example, if the home team's rating is 1000, then the home team's rating will be 1000 + constant value. And calculate the probability of the home team winning the game.
But
You can set the advantage value for each teams as different values.
But it will be complicated, so I will use the same constant value for all teams in this article.
Experiments
I will conduct experiments to determine the constant value.
I will check the accuracy, precision, recall of the predictions with and without the home team effect by the 23/24 Premier League data(Last day is 2024/2/21).
Results
| Home Advantage |
Average Accuracy |
Average Precision |
Average Recall |
F1 Score |
| 0 |
0.413 |
0.383 |
0.363 |
0.337 |
| 10 |
0.445 |
0.288 |
0.348 |
0.293 |
| 20 |
0.449 |
0.293 |
0.336 |
0.227 |
| 30 |
0.449 |
0.316 |
0.334 |
0.214 |
| 40 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
| 50 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
| 60 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
| 70 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
| 80 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
| 90 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
| 100 |
0.449 |
0.15 |
0.333 |
0.207 |
From the table above, the highest values of Precision, Recall, and F1 score are observed when the home team advantage is 0.
On the other hand, Accuracy is highest when the home team advantage is 20 or above, and it is the same value.
From these results, it can be understood that considering the home team advantage can improve accuracy, but leads to a decrease in precision, recall, and F1 score.
Discussion
It has been found that home advantage affects the evaluation metrics of predictions, but the effect is not the same.
The highest values for Precision, Recall, and F1 score were when the home team advantage was 0, indicating that considering home advantage does not necessarily improve the accuracy of predictions. On the contrary, Accuracy increased up to a home advantage of 20.
Generally, it is said that considering home advantage improves predictions results, but these results show that this is not always the case. Possible reasons include:
The value of home advantage being the same for all teams might have affected the results.
The data used was up to the middle of the league season and was limited.
Further experiments are considered necessary.
Conclusion
The home team effect is an important factor in the football game.
But it is not just simple, you need to adjust for each teams.