Assessing the influence of neutral grounds on match outcomes

ABSTRACT

The home advantage in various sports has been well documented. So far, we lack knowledge whether playing in neutral venues indeed removes many, if not all, theoretically assumed advantages of playing at home. Analysing over 3,500 senior men’s Gaelic football and hurling matches – field games with the highest participation rates in Ireland – between 2009 and 2018, we test the potential moderating influence of neutral venues. In hurling and Gaelic football, a considerable share of matches is played at neutral venues. We test the influence of neutral venues based on descriptive statistics, and multilevel logistic and multinomial regressions controlling for team strength, the importance of the match, the year, and the sport. With predicted probabilities ranging between 0.8 and 0.9, the favourite team is very likely to win home matches. The predicted probability drops below 0.6 for away matches. At neutral venues, the favourite team has a predicted probability of winning of 0.7. A Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) approach also reveals very substantive and significant effects for the “treatment” of neutral venues. Overall, neutral venues appear to be an under-utilised option for creating fairer and less predictable competition, especially in single-game knock-out matches.

KEYWORDS:

• Home advantage
• neutral grounds
• team ability
• hurling
• Gaelic football

Acknowledgments

We thank Gavan Reilly for collecting the match results and making the continuously updated datasets available online. Gavan Reilly collects the data on a weekly basis from newspaper and online coverage, makes the dataset publicly available, and explicitly consented to our use of the datasets for this paper. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) does not prohibit the collection or use of match results for research purposes.

Supplementary material

The underlying research materials for this paper, e.g. data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RJW5VN.Online supplementary material can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/24748668.2018.1525678.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The best (if still imperfect) analogy here is likely “wildcard” games in American sports.

2. In this case, the most relevant comparison are regional conference games in NFL albeit in most cases the provincial matches in Gaelic Games are typically knockout rather than round-robin with some exceptions.

3. The R statistical software (version 3.5.0) was used for all analyses. For the data analyses, regression models and visualisation we used the following R packages: cem (Iacus, King, & Porro, 2018), dplyr (Wickham et al., 2018), effects (Fox, 2003), ggplot2 (Wickham, 2016), lme4 (Bates et al., 2015) and nnet (Venables & Ripley, 2002).