Summary

The football reality in the last year changed dramatically because of two major events. The first one is the COVID pandemic, which leads to tragic consequences in all aspects of human activity; I hope we will have an end to this tragedy soon. The second one is the extensive use of VAR.
These events seem to affect the well-established, during the last decades, home advantage in football games. We have empty stadiums and a high-tech system that aims to minimize the errors in referees’ decisions.
Imagine how difficult it was, for an average referee, to give a doubtful penalty to the guest team with a full stadium curse him or worse. Imagine how easy it was to show a red card to a guest team’s player in doubtful conditions; the crowd would encourage him to do so.
Now we have these two factors out of the equation; we have no crowd, and we have a clear view of every doubtful moment because of the VAR. This article will try to find if the home advantage still exists and how much affected by the new game conditions.

By using my optimal equations method you can improve your betting decisions. See the performance update until January 31st.

Methodology

First, I will take a look at the past. We will examine 106380 games from 22 football divisions from season 2006-2007 to season 2019-2021 to find each outcome’s percentages. The data came from http://www.football-data.co.uk, an excellent website about football betting in general. To be more accurate, I will also, examine the first months of each season, until January 31th, to see if the time that events took place affects the outcome.
Then I will compare the past results with the current year’s results and, hopefully, I will be able to give a clear answer to the original question.

Compare results

First, let’s see the outcomes of all the past games in our dataset.

The minimum home win percentage in these years was 43.6%, the maximum was 46.2% , the median was 45.0%. The standard deviation for the home win is 0.8%. For the guests, the minimum win percentage in these years was 27.4%, the maximum was 29.8% , the median was 28.8%. The standard deviation for the away win is 0.8%

This season, until 31th January 2021, the home win percentage is 40.0%, the draw percentage is 26.5% and the away win percentage is 33.6%.

This is a huge difference! The home win is -3.6% below the minimum home win percentage in the past years and the away win 3.8% above the maximum away win percentage in the past years.

Now I will examine if the specific timeframe affected the results (months from Aug to Jan).

The minimum home win percentage in past years, for the specific timeframe, was 43.2%, the maximum was 46.2% , the median was 44.5%. The standard deviation for the home win is 1.0%. For the guests, the minimum win percentage in these years was 26.9%, the maximum was 30.3% , the median was 28.7%. The standard deviation for the away win is 1.0%. As expected, almost identical with the full year’s results.

Conclusions

Well, the numbers can talk, and they answered our question. The home advantage, if it still exists any, took a huge blow. When the home team is an overall better team still holds the winning percentages at an average level, although the away team has better chances of succeeding (about 1 – 2 percent).
The big difference is when we have either matching teams or an overall better guest team. Then we observe that the guest team’s winning percentages gain about 2.5 to 4 percent at the home team’s expense, and this is a huge difference.
So, double-check if you want to bet on a home team at odds above 2.10. If you like a guest team, bear in mind that you have extra value if the home team isn’t a strong favorite. If you want to bet on a favorite home team, you may do so, give a few more minutes to assess the game’s overall conditions, especially check if the guest team can win this game.

Finally, you can view a performance update of my optimal equations here..