Home advantage for Poland
England at at short odds to win and get to Rio, I hope they do. I was too young to remember the legendary 1973 performance, but it seems everybody is drawing parallels with that. The simple fact is that life is best understood backwards but you have to live it forwards, so most forecasters will not be examining that chapter of England’s history and the price reflects that.
England also failed to qualify for the 1978 finals and I do remember that. We failed on goal difference if I remember correctly?
Back to tonight though and it was with amusement that I read that the FA had sold 18,000 tickets to Polish supporters for England’s must win tie this evening. In reality you could probably add another 5-7k on the night I reckon, so up to a quarter of the crowd could be cheering on Poland.
This will have an impact whether you like it or not. Home advantage is worth around 0.40 of a goal on average. I ‘discovered’ this about twenty years ago! But I was more interested in why? Lots of effort later and accounting for work by others, it seems there are a number of factors that influence home advantage. There are many degrees of influence and data behind each facet but, in simple terms, here are the top levels factors that create the advantage.
(1) Home support makes players up their game
(2) Officials tend to be subtlety influenced by home support
(3) Local knowledge of how the ground plays, key points on the pitch (and off it)
So you can see that lots of Polish fans are bound to have an influence tonight as at least two the key factors behind home advantage are decreased by the presence of significant numbers of away fans. Because of the infrequent play at Wembley you would hazard the third doesn’t play such a role either.
Is it enough to overcome the odds? I doubt it; but it will probably make for the chance of a tension filled evening much more likely. Enjoy!!
Category: Football trading strategies
