There is a popular idea that home advantage has faded in modern football, worn down by better travel, better preparation and crowds that are quieter than they used to be. Part of that is true. Home advantage is smaller than it was. But it has not gone, and the evidence of the past few years has made its causes clearer than they have ever been.
This is a look at what the numbers actually show, and why the home side still wins more often than it should on paper.
How big is home advantage now?
Smaller than historically, still substantial.
In the early decades of league football, home sides won well over half of all matches. That share has fallen steadily, and in the Premier League it now sits somewhere in the mid-forties as a percentage, with away wins around thirty and draws making up the rest. The margin has narrowed. It remains a consistent, measurable edge that appears every season without exception.
For a club, that gap is the difference between finishing in the top half and the bottom half. A side that wins at home and draws away is doing well. A side that loses at home is in trouble regardless of its away form.
What did the empty stadiums prove?
That the crowd is the largest single component, which had been argued about for decades.
When matches were played without supporters, home advantage shrank sharply across European football, and in some leagues it disappeared altogether for a period. Home sides won less often, scored less, and received fewer favourable refereeing decisions. Everything else about home matches, the familiar pitch, the lack of travel, the routine, stayed the same. Only the crowd was missing, and the advantage went with it.
That was the clearest natural experiment football has ever provided, and it settled the question.
How does the crowd actually affect the match?
In two directions, and the second is the one people underestimate.
The first is on the players. A supportive crowd lifts the home side, giving them energy and confidence, and makes communication harder for the visitors. That effect is real but modest.
The second is on the officials. Research across many seasons and leagues has consistently found that referees lean slightly towards the home side in marginal decisions: fouls, bookings, penalties, added time. Not through bias, but because a crowd reacting to an incident influences how a referee perceives it. Remove the crowd and that lean disappears, which is exactly what the empty stadiums showed.
Why has it shrunk over time?
Because the things that made away travel difficult have been fixed.
Teams once travelled by coach on the morning of a match, played on pitches of wildly varying quality, and faced crowds that were far more hostile than today’s. Modern squads travel the day before, stay in hotels chosen for recovery, play on near-identical surfaces everywhere, and prepare for away matches with the same analysis they apply at home. Each of those changes has chipped at the advantage.
Television has changed the crowds too. Grounds with more neutral or occasional spectators produce less of the hostility that once made certain stadiums dreaded, and that is part of the decline.
Which grounds still have it?
The ones where the crowd is close, loud and expects to win.
Home advantage varies enormously between clubs. Some grounds remain genuinely hard to visit, because of their design, their atmosphere, or simply a long history of home sides winning there that makes visitors arrive expecting to lose. Others offer little edge at all. A club’s home record is a product of the team and the ground together, and the clubs with the strongest home records tend to be the ones that have cultivated both.
Our piece on why Arsenal vs Chelsea became one of London’s biggest rivalries covers a fixture where the home and away results have swung sharply between the two grounds.
How do managers plan around it?
By treating the two halves of the fixture list as different competitions.
A manager typically sets his side up more ambitiously at home, where the crowd expects to see attacking football and the players feel confident, and more cautiously away, where a draw is a reasonable result. Runs of home fixtures are where momentum is built. Runs of away fixtures are where seasons are most often damaged. The fixture list is studied closely for both.
Clubs near the bottom of the table lean on home advantage hardest. A struggling side that makes its own ground difficult has a route to survival that does not depend on winning away.
Is there a disadvantage to playing at home?
Occasionally, and it appears in a specific situation.
A home side expected to win, in front of an impatient crowd, can tighten up if the first goal does not come. The same supporters who lift a team when it is winning can weigh on it when it is not. Away sides that defend well and silence a ground turn the home advantage into something closer to a burden, and clubs whose supporters stay patient under those circumstances have an edge that does not show in any statistic.
For the players asked to perform under that pressure, the great midfielders are the ones who handle it best, as our piece on what makes a great Premier League midfielder explains.
Does the type of match change it?
Yes, and cup competitions show it most clearly.
Home advantage in knockout football is sharper than in the league, because a single match decides everything and the crowd’s effect is concentrated. Lower-division sides drawn at home against Premier League opposition in the cups win far more often than their league standing would predict, and the atmosphere in those matches is a large part of why. Neutral venues for semi-finals and finals remove the edge almost entirely, which is partly why those matches feel so different.
Why it still matters
Home advantage has shrunk but it has not disappeared, and the empty-stadium seasons showed exactly why it persists: the crowd affects players and officials in ways that no amount of travel improvement can remove. As long as supporters are in the ground, the home side starts with an edge. The margins at the top and bottom of the Premier League are small enough that the edge still decides seasons.
For supporters reading a table, the useful habit is to look at the home and away columns separately. A club’s position tells you less than the split does, and two sides level on points can be very different teams if one earns its points at home and the other on the road.
Frequently asked questions
Is home advantage still real in the Premier League?
Yes. It has shrunk over the decades but home sides still win noticeably more often than away sides, and the gap appears in every season.
What causes home advantage?
Mainly the crowd, which lifts home players and influences marginal refereeing decisions. Familiarity and the absence of travel contribute less than people assume.
What happened to home advantage in empty stadiums?
It shrank sharply, and in some leagues disappeared for a period, which showed that the crowd is its largest single component.