Abstract: Home field advantage is a well researched topic.  In this review of research, support is found for and against the existence of psychological issues related to home field advantage.  A possible difference in causes for home field advantage is inferred between professional and amateur levels.  Coaches and athletes can make adjustments to account for the causes of home field advantage.  Future research should look deeper into comparing professional and amateur causes of home field advantage. 

Home field advantage is a prevalent concept in the world of sports.  To describe home field advantage, Waters and Lovell (2007, p.46) use the definition: “home advantage is the term used to describe the consistent finding that home teams in sport competitions win over 50% of the games played under a balanced home and away schedule.”  The concept seems to make sense, it is your home field/court/arena so you know it better, the fans are cheering for you so you will perform better, and the fans are against the other team so they should feel the pressure and perform worse.  Having an understanding of what is actually going on inside of an athlete on either side of home field advantage can help coaches and players perform their best.  There is extensive research pointing to an actual effect of home field advantage and yet still evidence that says it is not actually real or at least significant.  So what is really going on?

Social facilitation theory, “contends that an audience creates arousal in the performer, which hurts performance on difficult tasks that have not been learned (or learned well) and helps performance on well-learned tasks” (Weinberg & Gould, 2007).  Looking at this theory, it would seem to make sense that home field advantage would exist.  If someone is playing a sport they are competent at with people supporting them, then they are going to do better.  Henningsen, Henningsen, and Braz (2009) tested for this theory in men’s college basketball.  They labeled free throw shooting as the easiest task, field goal shooting as the next easiest, and three point shooting as the most difficult.  Since social facilitation theory purports that the better the task is learned (or easier it is to perform), the more an audience will help, the researchers expected to see higher performance gains at home games most in free throw percentage, next field goal percentage, and last three point shooting percentage.  They found significant improvement in field goal shooting at home, but not so in the other categories.  They cite the high difficulty of three point shooting no matter where it is performed and a ceiling effect for free throw shooting as the reasons for the lack of improvement.  Social facilitation theory might very well explain some of what is going on in an athlete during a home field advantage situation, though more is going on.

Aggressiveness and competitiveness can help an athlete gain an edge in sports that are high in competition.  It is hard to win in a competition if you are not playing with all you have (aggressive), playing to win (competitiveness), and playing with confidence.  Testing for testosterone levels and psychological measures before games in elite jr. hockey athletes, Carré, Muir, Belanger, and Putnam (2006) found that athletes had significantly higher levels of testosterone at home games as compared to away games.  Increased testosterone can provide the decided edge in aggressiveness and competitiveness.  Therefore, the edge that athletes get from home field advantage might have more to do with physiological responses that affect the psychological state.  This correlated with the psychological measures taken before home and away games.  Players reported more self-confidence when playing at home and had higher somatic and cognitive anxiety when playing away games.

Waters and Lovell (2007) found similar results on pre-game psychological scores in English professional soccer matches.  They discovered that players showed higher levels of confidence and possessiveness when discussing home games.  Yet, unlike the Carré et. al (2006) article, when tested right before a contest, no significant differences were found in psychological scores for home or away games.  This might be due to the differences in testing times.  Waters et. al (2007) performed their interviews two hours before a contest while Carré et. al (2006) did theirs 45 minutes before.  Maybe the closer the athletes got to game time, the more anxiety was built.  Yet, another psychological effect might be in play.  The players reported that “the best thing about playing away was that they are not expected to win” (Waters & Lovell, 2007, p.50).  Therefore, maybe while thinking about an upcoming game, the players responded with expected psychological responses as the ones found in the Carré et. al. (2006), but due to lowered outside expectations right before an away game, anxiety is lowered for the athletes in Waters et. al (2007) study to a level that is similar to a home game.

Those results are further supported by Polman, Nicholls, Cohen, and Borkoles (2007).  They asked professional rugby players to journal mood states for 27 days.  The researchers found no significant difference in mood reports except on feeling tired when approaching a home or away game.  The similarity between this article and the Waters et. al (2007) article is that professional athletes were examined.  This differs from the Carré et. al (2006) and the Henningsen et. al (2009) articles which respectively studied jr. hockey players (16-20 years old) and college basketball players.  Therefore, there might be a certain amount of experience in playing in numerous away games by the time an athlete reaches the professional level so that negative psychological states are less likely to occur.  The question now becomes, why then is there still a documented home field advantage even in professional sports?

First, it might have more to do with the nature of the sport.  In a review of research, O’Connor (2008) reports that team sports show more susceptibility to home field advantage than individual sports.  Next, it might have more to do with contextual factors than psychological.  Such as familiarity with the home field/court/ice, fatigue due to travel, or referee bias.  Last, the nature of anxiety and arousal such as what Weinberg and Gould (2007) talk about in their book plays a part in influencing any athlete.  They tell us that people have different state and trait anxiety and that people have a different ideal level of arousal for optimal performance.  It would be logical to think that a professional athlete would be more likely to have a handle on anxiety when it would happen (coping strategies) and be able to get himself in an ideal arousal state to perform.  This could explain the lack of significant difference between psychological measures found in the two articles discussing professional athletes.  Therefore, psychological and contextual factors might influence home field advantage in non-professional settings while contextual factors might be more influential than psychological factors for the professional.

Supporting this idea of individual differences and contextual factors, Bray and Martin (2003) studied junior alpine skier’s psychological states before home and away competitions.  If coinciding with the previous articles, since non-professionals were being studied then there should be pre-game psychological differences found between home and away contests in this study.  Yet, there were not.  This may link to what O’Connor (2008) found, that individual sports show less home vs. away differences (skiing is very much individual).  Next, there are less direct crowds to build anxiety in the athlete when skiing than being in a field or dome setting like you would find in hockey, soccer, football, basketball, etc.  There are many factors playing on the athlete at any time in any sport that can affect their psychological state.

A coach or athlete can use these ideas to their advantage.  If they are involved in a team sport not at the professional level, then coping strategies should be taught and learned to help lessen the psychological effects of playing an away game.  Also, coaches at any level can do their best to account for contextual factors; such as talking to referees about how home games tend to be called, putting their athletes in conditions that will shorten the amount of time to get familiar with the opponents field (ex: playing indoors when headed to a dome stadium game), and providing extra rest time to make up for the fatigue of travel when headed on an away game.  Last, coaches should do their best to get to know their athletes so they can provide support and make adjustments based off of perceived psychological processes taking place.  No two athletes are identical and an observant coach of his or her players will be more effective.

It is recommended that future research compare the factors causing home field advantage between professional and amateur athletes as well as testing strategies for overcoming home field advantage causes.

References

Bray, S. R., & Martin, K. A. (2003). The effect of competition location on individual athlete performance and psychological states. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 4(2), 117-123.

Carré, J., Muir, C., Belanger, J., & Putnam, S. K. (2006). Pre-competition hormonal and psychological levels of elite hockey players: Relationship to the ‘home advantage.’ Physiology & Behavior, 89, 392–398

Henningsen, D. D., Henningsen, M. L. M., & Braz, M. (2009). A Test of Social Facilitation as a Predictor of Home Performance Advantage. Journal of Sports & Recreation, 3(1).

O’Connor, J. (2008). Home Advantage in Sport: Why Is a Sporting Team More Likely to Win When Playing at Home? Psychology Suite 101. Retrieved from http://psychology.suite101.com/article.cfm/home_advantage_in...

Polman, R., Nicholls, A. R., Cohen, J., & Borkoles, E. (2007). The influence of game location and outcome on behaviour and mood states among professional rugby league players. Journal of Sports Sciences, 25(13), 1491-1500.

Waters, A., & Lovell, G. (2002). An Examination of the Homefield Advantage in a Professional English Soccer Team from a Psychological Standpoint. Football Studies, 5(1), 46-59.

Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2007). Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology (4th ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics