A quick and helpful guide to home advantage statistics from a winning football tipster

As a football tipster on OLBG I am always checking different football betting stats in European matches. 

After dealing with over and unders betting in my previous blog I decided to put up an article about the significance of home advantage and how that can help with our betting.

You can utilize home advantage stats on all different types of bet, we highlight all different bet types at the betting school.

There were times when a team playing at home was a significant argument to back that team no matter what position it was in. 

However, as football modernized over the years, more and more leagues started to deviate from that rule.

HOW DO WE MEASURE HOME ADVANTAGE?

Looking at home and away form is one of the first things punters do when analysing a match, but we rarely see decisive difference or extremes that could convince us a bet is worth taking without any further analysis. In England, more than anywhere, teams fighting to avoid the drop can easily upset the odds and beat a promotion chaser or a playoff team. 

Some call them surprises, but to those of us with enough experience in betting, these types of situations are what we are trying to jump on to grab the extra value.

If you remember, Sunderland managed to beat a whole lot of top-six teams some years ago in order to stay in the Premiership and that comes to show how important motivation could be in transforming even mediocre players into superstars for a short period of time. 

Still, one must always look for scientific ways to measure the likelihood of a certain outcome and in home or away form, that measurement is called ‘'average home points per game''. In order to have that we must dig deep into math and surely with so many leagues and games it is extremely time-consuming to cover the entire continent. 

Luckily there are stats sites and software that could help and do the calculations for us while also keeping some historical data to complete the picture.

Now, while having that information is helpful, in order to call it scientific we need to have a big enough sample of games played. In that sense, relying on home points won with only 5 or 6 rounds played in a league is not a good strategy. 

Early in the seasons we must check the previous season data and compare how the new one measures against the perceived trend. Some of the variables we need to be aware of include the number of new teams entering the division, the changes to the structure of the division in question and the overall competitiveness of the division over the years. 

For example, if you are looking at the Estonian league, you would notice that the high number of home wins is based on the dominance of 2 or 3 teams historically. In a league of 10-12 teams, to have a third of them dominating could prove misleading as to the likelihood of a mid-table team winning a home game. 

Being aware of that helps a lot when reading the statistical data. In other situations, the entire setting of the leagues is being changed with the introduction of playoff/playout systems or giving more teams a chance to win a place in Europe.

If a league is being changed, then the historical data on home advantage might not be relevant anymore. 

One such example is the Bulgarian league, which has been home-dominated since the 1960s, but with an entirely new model, which includes championship rounds, additional relegation groups, and even a chance for the second to last team to play in Europe, emphasis on home and away form is not that significant anymore.

What I forgot to mention, as most English punters will find it hard to understand, is the inability of certain teams around Europe to play at their own stadiums. 

That in a sense diminishes the home advantage and again taking Bulgaria as an example, almost half the teams do not have a licenced stadium in the city they are originally from, meaning they have to travel as much as 70 miles to play a “home” game.

Similar situation were Coventry in when they had to play in Northampton several years ago.

As a result, attendance dropped and to no surprise, average points per “home” game also dropped compared to previous seasons. 

However, looking at the stats of Bulgarian football this season, the league is among the top five in home advantage, which brings us to the previously mentioned misbalances of teams quality and format changes.

The Stats

Just like in my previous blog about overs and unders, I have come up with some basic stats on average home points per game in several of the more relevant European leagues.

Again, I had to exclude certain leagues due to them being either too obscure or lacking enough competitive teams to expect a lower-ranked team winning anything on the road to a contender.

Hopefully that will be helpful in measuring the likelihood of surprises or simple favourite backing. 

I have highlighted some major leagues into two groups - where home teams in major leagues win more than 1.75 points per game at home and where home teams win less than 1.50 points per game. 

Quick summing up shows us that the home advantage is least significant in certain leagues, the home teams are still most likely to be winning games.

Points Per Game - Major European Leagues

You can see the major European Leagues early in the 2020/21 season. 

Currently, France looks to have home teams doing well and England seems to be having away teams doing better. 

After the next set of 5 games, the figures will be updated which will be around 31st December 2020.