Fact or Fiction: The away team is at a clear disadvantage

The idea of having an advantage or disadvantage based on playing at home or away has been ingrained into our brains from a young age, generally throughout our junior footballing days.

“We’re playing away this week boys, we need a big effort to get up over there!”

“We’re playing at home this week boys, we’ve got them!’

But is being the away team really a disadvantage?

The first thing we need to do is study the success rate of away teams in recent seasons.

Let’s look at the 2014 AFL home-and-away season, excluding the drawn game between Carlton and Essendon, which leaves us with 197 games. The away side won 88 times, while the home side took the chocolates on 109 occasions. A significant 21 game difference. In percentage terms, the away team won on 44.67 per cent of the time, and the home team got the four points 55.32 per cent of the time.

But this stat is far too vague, because there are different types of away games. Two Victorian teams could face off at a Victorian venue and two Western Australian teams could face off at a Western Australian venue.

So let’s limit the game pool to interstate away games. Exactly how often does the away side travel interstate and come home with the victory? The answer is 60 wins for the away side, and 72 losses. In more basic terms, 54.54 per cent of the time the home side fends off the travellers. Better odds than you expected? Probably.

In home-state away games, for example Fremantle versus West Coast or Hawthorn versus St Kilda, the odds of winning for the away team are worse, despite not having to jump on the airplane and travel, which is often used as an excuse. 28 wins and 37 losses for the away sides in their home state, giving them a percentage for success of 43.07 per cent.

Anyone want to jump on a plane and fly in circles for a few minutes before landing back in Melbourne to get that extra two-and-a-half per cent chance of winning?

We’ll rewind a bit, because it isn’t as simple as that. Allow me to pose you a new stat. In the first seven rounds of 2014 (before the bye rounds), the interstate travellers won 52.5 per cent of the time, with 21 wins and 19 losses. You actually have a better chance as the away side travelling interstate in the first seven weeks. So what explains the drastic drop from rounds 8-23 in success rate? Could it be fatigue?

Obviously as the season goes on the more often you have to travel, the more weeks where you get one less day recovery and the like, will eventually catch up to you. This could explain the win/loss rate of 21/19 in the first seven weeks compared to 39/53 from then on.

We’ll get to see this unfold for ourselves in the coming weeks, as currently interstate travellers are at a not-too-shabby (just under) 48 per cent rate, which will likely drop due to the aforementioned physical and mental fatigue as the season goes on.

So, the away (as in interstate travellers) side is at a disadvantage. Fact or fiction?

It depends on the part of the season, if it’s in the first half of the season, forget it, fiction. The success rate in recent seasons sits at 50 per cent or more. I’m not discounting that the crowd domination and the fly over doesn’t impact the players, but the stats say these things don’t affect players to the point of common loss until the second half of the season.

Speaking of that second half of season, fact. The exhaustion catches up to the interstate travellers, which widens the gap that was virtually non-existent before.

Speaking of the higher fail rate of late season travellers, fun fact: in last year’s final series, only one of six interstate travellers took the win.