How Much Does Home Field Advantage Matter in Soccer Games? A Causal Inference Approach for English Premier League Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel causal inference method to quantify the impact of home field advantage in the English Premier League, revealing its stronger influence on offensive metrics and its variation with team rankings.

Contribution

The paper develops a hierarchical causal model and inference procedure to identify and estimate the causal effect of home advantage in soccer, applied to Premier League data.

Findings

Home advantage mainly affects offensive statistics.

Lower-ranked teams exhibit higher home advantage.

Method shows excellent numerical performance in simulations.

Abstract

In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal inference approach to study the causal effect of home field advantage in English Premier League. We develop a hierarchical causal model and show that both league level and team level causal effects are identifiable and can be conveniently estimated. We further develop an inference procedure for the proposed estimators and demonstrate its excellent numerical performance via simulation studies. We implement our method on the 2020-21 English Premier League data and assess the causal effect of home advantage on eleven summary statistics that measure the offensive and defensive performance and referee-assessed disciplinary outcomes. We find that the home field advantage resides more heavily in offensive statistics than it does in defensive or referee statistics. We also find evidence that teams that had lower rankings retain a higher home field advantage.