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We didn’t underestimate them. They were just a lot better than we thought

Bobby Robson

The view from Ed Sheeran’s Box in the West Stand with the vocal Sir Bobby Robson Stand behind the goals to the left, the ​more sedate Sir Alf Ramsey Stand to the right and the Cobbold Stand directly opposite. Away fans are ‘seated’ in the top ​two sections at the far righthand side of the Cobbold Stand where they would be unable to suck the ball into either net.

A stadium tour on a cold Wednesday evening in January. A ground ​I’ve visited frequently since my teens, watching Ipswich Town win, ​draw or lose, but the first time I’ve been behind the scenes to visit ​some of the areas only the team and staff normally see. Fairly ​underwhelming to be honest - a little like a cheap Conference ​hotel - but still very emotive. The team have been doing very well ​of late since the arrival of new owners, GameChanger 20 Ltd, who ​brought in a new CEO, Mark Ashton who found us a brilliant new ​manager in Kieran McKenna. The team achieved promotion last ​season to the EFL Championship and are now lying second with ​over half the season played. No one is talking out loud of ​promotion to the Premier League, but the feeling is tangible.

As in most professional team sports, two games ​are played against each opposition team in a ​season; one at home and one away. The old adage ​goes that to do very well in a season, a team ​should look to at least win its home games and ​draw the away ones. This, of course, presupposes ​that there lies some advantage to playing at ​home. Given that the only difference between the ​two games played by the same two teams each ​season (barring a few changes in the precise ​players selected and/or the inevitable ​management changes) is the location of the ​match, then any home advantage must reside in ​either a) some beneficial element for the home ​team and/or b) a disadvantage for the away team. ​But how true is that supposition?

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre

Home advantage - despite what it might ​feel like - isn’t what it used to be. At its ​peak, in the 1895/96 season when 480 ​games were played across two ​professional levels, home teams won ​around 65% of their games. Since then, ​the home advantage has steadily ​declined, falling to just 41% across ​2,036 games played across four levels ​of professional football. That said, ​teams are still 12% more likely, on ​average, to win when playing at home ​and in 2006 in the English Premiership, ​a home team could have been expected ​to score 37% more goals than the away ​team (although this was dependent on ​the quality of the teams involved).

The benefit of playing at home can be attributed to several factors:

• The psychological effects supporting fans have on the players or ​referees
  
• The psychological or physiological advantages of playing near home ​in familiar situations
  
• The disadvantages away teams suffer from the rigours of travel
  
• Specific rules that favour the home team directly or indirectly
  

Whatever the cause, however, home advantage must recognise some ​deficit in a team whereby they cannot maintain performance independent ​of environment. This metric must therefore be inversely related to ​expertise i.e the better you are the smaller your home advantage.

Data from the Premier League, published in the Journal of Sports Sciences in ​2007, suggested that for every additional 10,000 people attending, home team ​advantage increased by 0.1 goals and that home teams were more likely to be ​awarded more penalty kicks and fewer red or yellow cards, a likelihood ​increasing with inexperienced referees. Similarly, Sports Illustrated, in 2011, ​reported that it was favourable treatment by game officials and referees that ​conferred advantages on home teams with such officials being unwittingly and ​psychologically influenced by home crowds with the influence being significant ​enough to affect the outcome in favour of the home team. VAR anyone? Or is ​the psychological home advantage conferred even to officials watching on ​monitors at Stockley Park? Wouldn’t it simply be better to accept that referee ​‘errors’ and/or unconscious biases are just part of what makes watching live ​sport so much more interesting. What else would you argue about in the pub ​afterwards? Of course, the potential financial consequences of such officiating ​errors, in the modern game, makes it more – rather than less – likely that video-​assisted refereeing will soon also be with us in the Championship. What next on ​this slippery slope to eradicated error? AI refereeing followed swiftly by match ​outcomes determined by prediction only without a ball needing to be kicked? ​The entire season could then be determined, error free, in just a few ​milliseconds from its start.

But what about us, the crowd? Are we really the proverbial ​12th (wo)man? The data, although not entirely conclusive, ​suggests that the home crowd size seems to have little or no ​effect when playing teams of approximately equal standing, ​but has increasing impact in games involving unevenly ​matched teams. So, if you are the superior team, home ​support can further intimate inferior opposition whilst ​strong support for a poor home team improves the ​underdog performance. If both teams are equally bad, sadly ​there is then very little to shout about.

But how does the crowd help? In addition to ​direct physiological arousal (physical and mental) ​in response to the home support, psychological ​reinforcement theory states that activities that ​routinely elicit reward tend, for that reason, to ​persist. So, if the home crowd react favourably ​when their team performs well against a rival, ​those performances tend to be repeated and, ​over time, constitute the home advantage. This, ​of course, does not explain the social context of ​why this happens. For that, we need to appreciate ​how a team and its players become exemplars of ​a local community in whom they are invested and ​in whose destiny they find themselves implicated. ​In this way, a community can become conscious ​of itself and the team becomes the embodiment ​of that. In that way, Ipswich Town Football Club is ​therefore much more than a collection of skilled ​footballers and a football match at Portman Road ​is a ritual that expresses social commitment in a ​way rarely seen otherwise in the town.

There are occasions when the strengthening and ​vivifying action of society is especially apparent. In the ​midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, ​we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which ​we are incapable when reduced to our own forces; and ​when the assembly is dissolved and when, finding ​ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, ​we are then able to measure the height to which we have ​been raised above ourselves.

Emile Durkheim

Prem Kumar

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Home advantage.

In this collection of photoessays, I aim to capture certain ​aspects of modern culture as seen through a lens shaped ​either by Apple, Fujifilm and/or my own perspective.

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