Assessing the Relevance of the Home Advantage in Sports

The continued interest of researchers in understanding the home advantage in sports has led to many different attempts in determining the meaningfulness of the effect. Specifically, it has been argued that the typically large sample sizes examined in this field jeopardize the meaningfulness of common statistical tests that are based on proportions. To combat this, scholars have recommended to focus on standardized effect size measures instead. While such unit-less measures allow for comparisons between studies, they do not reflect the actual units of measurement that players and coaches work with. Using the critical values of the associated equations alongside simulated data, this paper shows that hypothesis tests indeed yield significant results when the home teams win few additional points, while at the same time, effect size measures would require a large amount of additional points won by the home teams which rarely occurs in any sport to yield at least a small effect. Therefore, it is recommended to report results in relevant measurement units which are practically relevant like the average number of points won by the home teams alongside the common standardized test statistics to make the effect more tangible.