By Bulldog Drummond
Arsenal’s form at home this season has been worse than the team’s performance away as the comparative table below shows…
| Pos | Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | Arsenal at home | 17 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 19 | 20 | -1 | 22 |
| 7 | Arsenal away | 17 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 27 | 17 | 10 | 27 |
Arsenal’s home win percentage is 35%, the away win percentage is 47%.
Arsenal’s goal scoring at home is 1.12 per game. Away it is 1.59 per game. And while our defence, the one outstanding part of the team this season, concedes one goal a game away, they let 1.18 slip past at home.
Now Untold has often considered home and away form this season, not least because a number of normally literate “outlets” have published false stories suggesting that a change in the home/away divide is not a reality.
There are have 125 home wins in the Premier League this season, 132 away wins this season and 80 draws. In percentage terms that gives us 39% away wins, 37% home wins and 24% draws.
Arsenal at home have 35% wins, 24% draws and 41% defeats. So against the league average we are underachieving at home, and that is where our improvement needs to be. Our level of draws at home is in line with the national average, which considering we are half way down the league table is what you might expect. But the number of home wins should be higher.
And that of course is just to strike the average. We would normally consider Arsenal to be achieving far beyond the average.
Obviously our Europa League performances are less of a guide to what might happen in this forthcoming game since we clearly were playing lower standard teams in the first six matches of the competition.
| Date | Game | Res | Score | Competition |
| 22 Oct 2020 | Rapid Wien v Arsenal | W | 1-2 | Europa League |
| 29 Oct 2020 | Arsenal v Dundalk | W | 3-0 | Europa League |
| 5 Nov 2020 | Arsenal v Molde | W | 4-1 | Europa League |
| 26 Nov 2020 | Molde v Arsenal | W | 0-3 | Europa League |
| 3 Dec 2020 | Arsenal v Rapid Wien | W | 4-1 | Europa League |
| 10 Dec 2020 | Dundalk v Arsenal | W | 2-4 | Europa League |
| 18 Feb 2021 | Benfica v Arsenal | D | 1-1 | Europa League |
| 25 Feb 2021 | Arsenal v Benfica | W | 3-2 | Europa League |
| 11 Mar 2021 | Olympiakos v Arsenal | W | 1-3 | Europa League |
| 18 Mar 2021 | Arsenal v Olympiakos | L | 0-1 | Europa League |
| 8 Apr 2021 | Arsenal v Slavia Praha | D | 1-1 | Europa League |
| 15 Apr 2021 | Slavia Praha v Arsenal | W | 0-4 | Europa League |
| 29 Apr 2021 | Villarreal v Arsenal | L | 2-1 | Europa League |
We have suffered two defeats and had two draws in the series this season. The home and away figures are slightly skewed because of the situation in playing Benfica where both the games were played on neutral ground.
But the fact is that we have drawn and lost our last two “home” games in the Europa. And we really must win this home game, either by 1-0 or by two clear goals if we want to finish this off in normal times.
Quite why home teams are doing worse than away teams in empty stadia I am not sure. We know through the experimentation carried out by London School of Economics (part of the University of London) that away teams are normally penalised by referee bias, generally caused by crowd noise. (This of course may not be the only referee bias but it is the bias thus far identified.)
But with no crowds at all we might think that home teams could still have an advantage due to familiarity with the environment.
The best guess we have as to why this is not the case (and guess it has to be until some research comes along to show this), is that the referees have a bias towards away teams in general, in order to overcome the home bias caused by the crowd. However this away bias is never enough, and referees always underestimate the level of home bias caused by the crowd.
Now the crowds are gone the home bias vanishes but the referees are still instinctively trying to compensate in favour of the away teams.
Any alternative theories to explain the above average away form, please do write in. But you might also like to note
- Results from crowdless games are different from those with crowds. Why?
- How even a serious science magazine has used fake data on football
Highlights from most of the games we have played against Villareal through history are given in
You might also be interested in
The video collection series (videos of games against one club collected together)
- Arsenal against Newcastle: the video collection (inc the 7-3 win!)
- Arsenal v Everton – the historic games on video
- Arsenal v Fulham – the history in videos
- Seven amazing historic videos of Arsenal v Liverpool
- Arsenal against Villarreal. Videos from all the past matches
Over 250 historic videos (individual videos of matches)
I think for the Gunners who will start and play as substitutes in the Arsenal home Europa League Cup semifinal 2nd leg home match against Villarreal CF to beat them tomorrow night, and qualify for the final match.
The Gunners will need to first and foremost eschew any ill-form game playing of profligancy in front of Villarreal’s goalmouth in the match to score goals in the game and beat the Yellow Submarine.
The Gunners must unfailingly convert the high percentage of the goals scoring chances they will create in the match to score. And also covert the half chances including the ones that accidentally fell to them into goals for Arsenal in the match.
But if the Gunners fail to convert into goals for Arsenal the high percentage of the goals scoring opportunities they have in the game to score goals for Arsenal in the match. But fluff their lines. Then, the Gunners beating the Yellow Submarine tomorrow night could become difficult for them to successfully execute beating them with a wide goals scoreline. But 1-0 home win in the match to Arsenal will see them knockout Villarreal from reaching the final.
Arsenal don’t have the midfield and defence players in their first team squad this season who can regularly score goals for the club in matches. More so, at the top level of the game since the Gunners like Metersacker(BFG), Koscielny, Monreal, Ramsey Carzola who were regularly scoring goals Arsenal to lift the club before they all left the club.
These 5 past Arsenal players were accounting for a good number of the goals scored by Arsenal in every season campaign when they were at Arsenal.
Therefore, Arsenal forward players who will start the Villarreal match and are brought in into it to play as subs shouldn double up very well to face the huge task of beating Villarreal tomorrow night to knock them out from reaching the ELC final this season that is before them to successfully execute to the letter. And execute it to the letter by fighting very hard in the game for Arsenal to win the match and win it. Making sure is Arsenal that reached the final but not Villarreal CF who they will deny tomorrow night from playing in the final.
My impression of both the Champions League semi-finals is that the referees were sympathetic to the English teams and strict in their approach to PSG and Real Madrid.
I do not expect a similar approach tomorrow at the Emirates.
Tony, here is another piece of refereeing research. It’s quite old (2005), so is not lockdown-related, but contains some interesting observations regarding the manifestations of referee bias. Published by Harvard and MIT
social pressure as a determinant of corruption
Seismic – thank you that is very interesting to see such an early piece of research on this. Thanks.
My pleasure. It’s surprising what one can find on the internet when one least expects to.