Which club got the most home bias this past season?

By Tony Attwood

As we have shown, the majority (but not all) of referees covering Premier League matches show a home bias.  The reason for this, as described in full here and is proven by detailed independent academic research.  The cause is quite clearly shown to be the influence of the crowd on the referee and the linesmen, and the officials’ inability or unwillingness to stop themselves being influenced.

As the figures show a small minority of referees are able to avoid this bias, but the rest don’t seem to care.

2018/19 – the last complete season before covid began to interfere with games saw what had become a regular pattern of results continue, with fractionally under 58% of points allocated going to the home clubs, giving the home team a clear advantage.

In 2019/20 the last ten games of the season were played with no crowds present, but this made little difference to the overall percentage of points claimed by home and away teams.  I haven’t seen an explanation from elsewhere as to why this happened but I suspect it was because, by the last ten games of the season, patterns of play were set.

However, 2020/21 was played without crowds and through this season home advantage dropped by almost 10%.  Instead of 58.02% of the points being obtained by the home teams, this dropped to 48.72%.  For the first time in the entire history of the league, the away teams did better than the home teams across the whole season.

2021/22 saw crowds back and the home percentage of points rose to 53.52% – not a complete recovery of home advantage (it was 4.5% lower than 2019/20) but some recovery.

No explanation has been given other than that by the academic research: referees are significantly influenced by the crowd.  Take that influence away and the results change.

	Home points	Home %	Away points	Away %
2018/19	614	57.97%	445	42.02%
2019/20*	608	58.02%	440	41.98%
2020/21	515	48.72%	542	51.28%
2021/22**	547	53.52%	475	46.48%

*Football suspended from 13 March 2020, resumed 17 June with games without crowds.

** Crowds returned for the start of the season

But this last season, with crowds back, the numbers have not bounced back to their old format completely, and the research into the results of individual referees have shown that while the majority have returned to their old ways of favouring the home team, a minority of the referees have learned from this experience and are now being much less biased by the crowd.

Nevertheless, enough referees have returned to their old ways of favouring the home team for most clubs to get more home points than away points as this table for 2021/2 shows…

Pos	Team	Home Pts	Away Pts	Home bias
1	Manchester City	47	46	+1
2	Liverpool	49	43	+6
3	Chelsea	34	40	-6
4	Tottenham Hotspur	40	31	+11
5	Arsenal	41	28	+13
6	Manchester United	35	23	+12
7	West Ham United	32	24	+8
8	Leicester City	34	18	+16

Clearly, the top three have different figures from the rest of the teams near the top, and equally clearly in the current climate to get near the top of the league clubs have to be performing well both at home and away.  For the clubs that finished from fourth to eighth, in all cases, home form was significantly better than away form.

So we can easily conclude that if we want Arsenal to rise up the league next season the answer has to be a case of improving the away performance.  Here is the away table for last season

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Manchester City	19	14	4	1	41	11	30	46
2	Liverpool	19	13	4	2	45	17	28	43
3	Chelsea	19	12	4	3	39	11	28	40
4	Tottenham Hotspur	19	9	4	6	31	21	10	31
5	Brighton and Hove A	19	7	8	4	23	21	2	29
6	Arsenal	19	9	1	9	26	31	-5	28
7	Wolverhampton W	19	8	3	8	18	18	0	27
8	West Ham United	19	7	3	9	27	25	2	24
9	Manchester United	19	6	5	8	25	35	-10	23
10	Aston Villa	19	7	1	11	23	25	-2	22

Only Manchester United of the top ten clubs, in their away games conceded more goals than Arsenal away from him.  So let’s try and see where we could find an improvement.

In five of Arsenal’s league defeats the opposition scored three goals or more – that’s a good place to start making an improvement in defence.

Date	Match	Result	Score	Competition
28 Aug 2021	Manchester City v Arsenal	L	5-0	Premier League
20 Nov 2021	Liverpool v Arsenal	L	4-0	Premier League
02 Dec 2021	Manchester United v Arsenal	L	3-2	Premier League
04 Apr 2022	Crystal Palace v Arsenal	L	3-0	Premier League
12 May 2022	Tottenham Hotspur v Arsenal	L	3-0	Premier League

The only problem here is that the club built a completely new defence last season, so it seems unlikely we will build another defence this season.  It means those players have to improve.

But there is hope because of the players’ ages (data from TransferMarkt).

• Ben White: 24
• Gabriel: 24
• Rob Holding: 26
• Kieran Tierney: 24
• Nuno Tavares: 22
• Takehiro Tomiyasu: 23
• Cedric Soares: 30

The defensive midfield in front of the players is made up of 28 and 29 year olds so there is no youth problem there.  And of course all those players above will now have one more year’s experience of playing for Arsenal, in front of PGMO referees.