Home Field Advantage in Women’s International Football

Abstract The paper estimates the size of the home field advantage in international women’s football and its temporal variability, using 4,416 matches from 1980 through 2022. We document overall home advantage, home advantage over time, and home advantage across geography. Over the entire sample period, the average home advantage is 52.3%. However, home advantage started out very high, declined to less than 60% by the 1980s and experienced further declines throughout the decades after. We show that home advantage differs across geography. Our analysis concludes that the home advantage in international women’s football has statistically converged to that in international men’s football. We postulate that this convergence was aided by knowledge, tactics, nutrition, and physical training accumulated in over a century of international men’s football.