While the degree to which it affects the athletes can vary across sport, the home team typically has the advantage to an equal strength away team. Obviously, an uneven matchup will not lead to a definite upset with an inferior home team, as the advantage isn’t that strong. We were interested to see how the home win percentage in the Premier League with the absence of fans post-COVID compares to the home win percentage pre-COVID.

            The average win percentage across all 20 Premier League teams in the 2019-2020 season up until March 6 is 45.17%, and the average win percentage from June 17 until the end of the season in August is 45.36%. These statistics show that the home win percentage barely changed in the absence of fans in the stadiums, with only a 4.30% increase post-COVID. Teams like Chelsea and Sheffield United saw a major increase in their home win percentage after the restart: Chelsea and Sheffield United went from 46.67% home games won to 100% and 75%, respectively. Eight of the Premier League teams increased their home win percentage after the restart, with the other twelve teams seeing a decreased home win percentage. We expected that playing on home ground wouldn’t be as much of an advantage without the home fans in the audience, which may have been the case with Liverpool. Liverpool, holding the record for most home wins in a season, had a 100% home win percentage pre-COVID in comparison with their 75% home win percentage post-COVID. The drastic jump in home win percentage could be to the few games played at home after the restart. Liverpool only played four home games post-COVID, so only losing one of those four games caused their percentage to drop 25%.

            It is difficult to say how telling these results are due to the small sample size of home games post-COVID. Each team played between four and six games at home after the restart, compared to the thirteen to fifteen home games before the season halted. The season’s games after the restart may have been an uneven match up that, whether fans were there or not, the home team would have still lost the game. It is interesting to see that maybe the absence of a home crowd won’t be as detrimental to the home team’s wins as initially expected. The advantage of the home team knowing the stadium and not having to travel could prove to be more important than the home fans. As baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer are starting in the US, many people may be wondering how the home field advantage will change. Basketball may be the most interesting since no team will have the home field advantage. It will be interesting to see, in sports where we could have a larger sample size, whether the same result holds.

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Let’s begin by taking each team’s winning record on the road. The Nationals won 43 of their 81 road games in the 2019 season, giving them a winning percentage, which we will call N, of 53.09%. The Astros won 47 of their 81 road games in the 2019 season, giving them a winning percentage, which we will call A, or 58.02%. So, based off the teams’ winning record on the road for the regular season, the probability that the visiting team would win each game of the World Series is (N⁴)(A³) since the Nationals won 4 games on the road, while the Astros won 3. This works out to a 1.7% probability that every game for the 2019 World Series was won by the visiting team, based off the on the road record of each team in the match up. Basically, this means we could expect this to happen between one and two times every hundred years. So, since we hadn’t seen this in over a hundred years, it’s almost like the inevitable finally happened.  

Now, this was the World Series – when the two best teams in baseball face off. So maybe the winning percentage on the road for the regular season isn’t all that representative of winning in the championship games. Let’s look at data since 1995 since this is when the Wild Card play-in game began in Major League Baseball. During that time, 63 of the 140 World Series games have been won by the visiting team. So, we can take the probability that the road team will win a World Series game, which we will call T, is 0.45. For every game in the World Series to be won by the visiting team, the series must go to seven games. Using this formulation, the probability that the visiting team will win every game of the World Series is T⁷, or 0.37%. This can be interpreted as about once every 300 years. 

Are you surprised that only the visiting team won in the 2019 World Series? Odds appear to be in your favor that we saw an anomaly and a series for the ages!

The post Long odds: What was the probability of the visiting team winning every World Series game? first appeared on 'CATS STATS.