Borta bra men hemma bäst? En studie om hemmaplansfördel inom svensk elitfotboll säsongerna 2015-2020

Sammanfattning: The home-field advantage is a common subject in team sports and football. This phenomenon implies that a team performs better on home field than it would, if it met the same team on away field. Furthermore, the football season 2020 has been rather unique thus no crowd has been allowed into Swedish football stadiums. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine, analyze and compare statistics and then interview professional Swedish football players to find possible explanations to the final result of Allsvenskan 2020 for men. To fulfill our purpose with this study, we’ve used the method of triangulation and as a theoretical framework, we've used 6 of Pollards (2008) 8 factors concerning home field advantage. We´ve gathered all the statistics from the website footballstats.org and later on processed it thru a chi-squared-test to compare a theoretical outcome for the season 2020 with the crowd, with the actual outcome of the season 2020 without the crowd. The theoretical outcome was created by calculating the mean value of the seasons 2015-2019 combined. To facilitate the process, Allsvenskan has been divided into three pools. To explain our statistical result we’ve interviewed 3 players from different teams in the league, one from each pool. The results showed that the home-field advantage has decreased in all three pools. The teams in pool one have won significantly less games at home-field, while the teams in pool three has won more games at away field compared to the theoretical outcome. Crowd effects, psychological effects and travel effects have had the most impact on the home-field advantage according to the interviewed players. Rule factors, specific tactics and referee bias had less impact on the outcome.