Analyzing the home advantage in English soccer, with R
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It's well-known that the home team has an advantage in soccer (or football, as it's called in England). But which teams have made the most of their home-field advantage over the years? Evolutionary biologist (and Liverpool fan) Joe Gallagher analyzed the percentage of points won in the UK Premier League (which awards 3 points for a win and one point for a draw) for teams at home and away:
On average, Premier League teams win around 60% of their points at home. The green bars show the 10 teams who won most of their points at home (Burnley managed only a single away win and an away draw in their 2009 season) and the purple bars shows 10 teams who defied the odds to win most of their points in away games.
Joe used the R language to perform the analysis and create the chart above, with the engsoccerdata package providing the historical home/away score data (augmented with current-season data from the web). You can find the R code used to perform the analysis, along with several other interesting analyses of the data, at the link below.
Joe Gallagher: Home advantages and wanderlust
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