Examining drivers of the home advantage in German volleyball

Basic data for this talk

Type of talk: scientific talk
Name of speakers: van Meurs, Edda; Rehr, Jan-Philipp; Raue-Behlau, Charlotte; Strauss, Bernd
Date of talk: 12/07/2022
Talk language: English

Information about the event

Name of the event: FEPSAC 2022 16th European Congress of Sport & Exercise Psychology
Event location: Padua

Abstract

The magnitude of the home advantage (HA) in team sports depends on e.g., the type of sport, gender and more (cf. Gomez et al., 2021). The few studies on volleyball (overview: Paloa et al., 2021) mainly investigated female leagues (exceptions: Paloa et al., 2015; Pollard & Gomez, 2017) without assessing potential HA drivers and while being methodologically limited (e.g., small samples, neglecting nested structure). The present archival analysis examines HA at the highest level of German volleyball (men and women), including a series of COVID-19 crowd-restricted games. We analyse how audience size (absolute & relative to capacity), travel distances, and COVID-19 induced changes drive HA. Data from volleyball-bundesliga.de on all matches from 1996 to 2021 (N=6,811, 52.8% female) includes details on match statistics, venue, and audience size. Allowing intercepts to vary between teams (2-level model), which did not improve the fit (Var=0.001, AICdiff=2.2), we found a small HA (53%-60%). The chance of winning increased by OR=2.78, 95% CI [2.29; 3.38] when playing at home, while controlling for team strengths (OR=1.68 [1.64; 1.71]) and gender differences (ORfemale=0.86 [0.72; 1.03]). HA did not increase significantly with more spectators (absolute: OR=0.96 [0.87; 1.06]; relative: OR=0.97 [0.88; 1.07]) nor due to travelled distance (OR=0.92 [0.84; 1.02]) or COVID-19 (OR=0.96 [0.66; 1.39]). HA did not change over time, OR=1.06 [0.89; 1.26]. Similar trends were observed for the number of sets won. These findings indicate that spectators and travelled distance drive HA less than expected (Carron et al., 2005), at least in German volleyball.

Keywords: home advantage; volleyball; COVID-19; spectator influence