Do Premier League Teams Really Have a Home Advantage?
- Elisha Antunes
- Jun 8, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 24, 2025
We’ve all heard the saying: “It’s tough to win away from home.” But how true is that when it comes to the Premier League?
Curious about the impact of home-field advantage in football, I dove into a season’s worth of match data from the EPL to explore whether playing on home turf actually correlates with better performance.
This wasn’t just about counting wins — I wanted to understand the broader patterns: Are home teams more dominant in terms of score lines? How often do they win compared to away sides? Do draws balance the scale?
About the Dataset
I worked with a dataset (E0.csv) containing match results for the entire 2023/2024 Premier League season. Each row represents a single fixture and includes:
Home and away team names
Full-time goals scored by each team
Full-time result (labeled FTR), which captures whether the match ended in a Home Win (H), Draw (D), or Away Win (A)
This structured format made it ideal for calculating win percentages and engineering new features to measure game dynamics like goal differences and total goals.
Analytical Approach
After cleaning the data and dropping any incomplete rows, I began by converting the full-time result into numeric labels: 0 for home wins, 1 for draws, and 2 for away wins. This allowed for easier analysis and aggregation.
Next, I created two simple but powerful features:
goal_diff: The difference between home and away goals — a proxy for game dominance
total_goals: The combined number of goals in each match — helpful for spotting open vs. cagey games
With those in place, I tallied how often each type of match result occurred and translated that into win rate percentages. To bring it all to life, I plotted the results using a clean bar chart that made the trends immediately visible.
What I Found
The results were telling:
Home Wins: 46%
Draws: 26%
Away Wins: 28%
Almost half of all games were won by the home team — a clear signal that playing at home carries a real advantage. Away teams, by contrast, won less than a third of their matches. Draws, while common, trailed both outcomes by a fair margin.
This pattern held up even when I looked at the goal differences: Home wins tended to come with higher margins, while away wins often hovered closer to the 1-goal range.
Tools and Packages
Python for scripting
Pandas for data wrangling and feature creation
Matplotlib for visualization
Label Encoding to prep categorical data
Reflections & What’s Next
What started as a basic win-rate comparison turned into a deeper exploration of how match context and data features can tell a story. The analysis reinforced the intuitive idea that playing at home matters — but it also showed me how even a few engineered columns can add depth to an otherwise surface-level investigation.
