Besides the data I gathered for the soccer seasons in 2013 around the world, I also put together all seasons for England, Italy, Germany and Spain. The Big Four, as they are referred to. I was particularly interested, how the home field advantage changed over time, that is: Did the number of home wins increase or decrease over time? My educated guess was: It decreased.
And as the figure below shows, my guess was quite good.
Well, honestly this was not really hard to guess and the results are not innovative at all (really selling my mild research here!). In my opinion more interesting, however, are the draw and away win fractions given below.
We can see quite distinct progressions of these two statistics over time, yet they all seem to "converge" to similar values. My favorite graph is the draw fractions in Italy. Must have been some boring decades between 1960 and 1990 with all these draws. Maybe this was a result of the famous Catenaccio.
More detailed information about home filed advantage in soccer is given here, here and here.
The alert reader might have noticed, that there is some y-axis skulduggery going on. Well, I made these plots long time ago and was too tired of redoing them, so deal with it :-)Labels: Soccer Analytics
