Mar 29, 2017 - qualification for the 2006, 2010 and 2014 football World Cup finals, ... units, a general linear model produced a significant fit to the data.
International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport
Factors affecting home advantage in football World Cup qualification Richard Pollard & Vasilis Armatas To cite this article: Richard Pollard & Vasilis Armatas (2017): Factors affecting home advantage in football World Cup qualification, International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24748668.2017.1304031
Published online: 29 Mar 2017.
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Date: 29 March 2017, At: 11:33
International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24748668.2017.1304031
Factors affecting home advantage in football World Cup qualification Richard Pollarda and Vasilis Armatasb a
Department of Statistics, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA; bSchool of Physical Education and Sport Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
ABSTRACT
An analysis is made of home advantage in the group stages of qualification for the 2006, 2010 and 2014 football World Cup finals, the first such study of national teams worldwide in a competitive setting. Home advantage was greatest in Africa and South America where the home team won just over 69% of all points earned; it was lowest in Europe (56%). Bolivia was the country with the greatest home advantage. Using each of the 2040 games as the observational units, a general linear model produced a significant fit to the data (R2 = 0.326), home points being the dependent variable, with a set of factors believed to influence home advantage as predictor variables. After controlling for team strength and allowing for the effects of other variables in the model, home points were significantly related to altitude of the home stadium, crowd size and number of time zones crossed by the visiting team (all p
