Does shirt colour contribute to the home advantage in football?

Over the past 20 years, the home advantage in sport (the idea that teams playing at home are statistically more likely to win) has been a hot topic for academic study, in particular the reasons why the home advantage exists.

One theory holds that the fact that the home team can pick the shirt colour has an important role, especially if one chooses red. This is due to the fact that previous studies have shown that the colour red has an important psychological factor in sport and it can contribute to a winning edge.

It is therefore posited that due to the fact that the home team is allowed to pick their shirt colour, the option to pick red would therefore seem like an obvious psychological tactic, and thus contribute to a home team’s chance of winning.

However a recent article has closely studied data from 7720 matches over the first 20 seasons of the English Premier League has found that whilst data does indeed show that teams wearing red were winning more home games, once team ability was factored-in, it was found that teams playing in red shirts did not show any clear advantage.

The data did support the home advantage theory, though and found that there was a clear home advantage with 60.77% of total points being won in home games.

International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
Volume 12, Issue 1, 2014 Mark S. Allen & Marc V. Jones

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