Home Improvement: Which EPL Teams Get the Biggest Boost from Their Own Pitch?

While reading Andrew McNair's excellent piece on British football stadiums I couldn't help but geek out a little.

If you have read a few of my articles here at BleacherReport.com, you'll know I'm a sports geek of the highest order.  So when Andrew started mentioning specific venues as providing enhanced home-field advantage, my first thought was "I should measure this."

The question in my mind (and this may differ from the focus of Andrew's article) is which venues provide their team the biggest boost, as opposed to those most likely to see a victory by the respective home team.  This distinction may be a bit complicated to tease out because it can be hard to separate the home team from the home venue.

Is it tough to win at Old Trafford because it is Old Trafford, or because that's where Manchester United plays?

So how to do it?  Well fixtures like the EPL, which follows the home-away double round robin format, offer a clear and easy method of sorting it all out (at least for games within the league).  Simply put, it hinges on calculating how much better a team does at home than on the road.

Over the course of a season, the average disadvantage of the road games will equal the average home-field advantage for the league. So, by removing the the 'away-disadvantage', we can isolate the advantage gained on the home pitch.  (If you would like an explanation of the detailed math, you may email me.)

Using data from 2000/2001 through 2006/2007 (sorry, full seasons only), I determined the average home-field advantage for each team that played in the EPL in at least four of the seasons covered.  The results are given below and the values are given in goals per game.  Average home-field advantage for the EPL over the period was 0.4 goals per game.

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