Home advantage is worth 5x more in the Libertadores than in Italy
· GolStats
Everyone knows playing at home helps. Almost nobody measures how much — and, more importantly, almost nobody checks whether the gap between two leagues is real or just sampling luck.
We took the 4,563 finished matches in our database, across 16 competitions, and measured home advantage the simple way: how many more goals the home side scores than the away side.
The headline number
Across 4,563 matches:
- Home: 1.478 goals per match
- Away: 1.160 goals per match
- Home advantage: +27.5%
Home teams win 44.0% of the time, draw 26.9% and lose 29.1%. The average is 2.64 goals per match, with 49.1% of games going over 2.5.
In aggregate, playing at home is worth roughly a third of a goal per match. That is not trivial — it is larger than the gap between many mid-table sides.
Where home advantage matters most
This is where it gets interesting. The effect is far from uniform:
| Competition | Matches | Home | Away | Advantage | Home win | Over 2.5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libertadores | 126 | 1.34 | 0.87 | +53.6% | 49.2% | 36.5% |
| Copa do Brasil | 134 | 1.25 | 0.87 | +44.0% | 43.3% | 34.3% |
| Série D | 592 | 1.35 | 0.94 | +43.1% | 43.8% | 37.8% |
| La Liga | 380 | 1.57 | 1.12 | +40.4% | 48.9% | 50.0% |
| National teams | 98 | 1.76 | 1.27 | +38.7% | 46.9% | 57.1% |
| Copa Sudamericana | 128 | 1.31 | 0.96 | +36.6% | 43.8% | 38.3% |
| Brasileirão Série A | 205 | 1.48 | 1.11 | +33.9% | 46.3% | 48.8% |
| Eredivisie | 309 | 1.80 | 1.37 | +31.4% | 44.7% | 61.5% |
| Série C | 150 | 1.27 | 0.97 | +31.0% | 46.0% | 41.3% |
| Ligue 1 | 310 | 1.58 | 1.24 | +27.9% | 45.8% | 52.6% |
| Série B | 200 | 1.29 | 1.02 | +26.5% | 43.0% | 42.0% |
| Premier League | 380 | 1.53 | 1.22 | +24.7% | 42.6% | 55.0% |
| Bundesliga | 308 | 1.77 | 1.45 | +22.1% | 43.8% | 63.6% |
| Championship | 557 | 1.39 | 1.20 | +16.2% | 41.7% | 50.4% |
| Saudi Pro League | 306 | 1.59 | 1.42 | +11.7% | 44.1% | 56.2% |
| Serie A (Italy) | 380 | 1.28 | 1.15 | +11.0% | 38.9% | 45.8% |
At the extremes the gap is large: home advantage in the Libertadores is worth almost five times what it is worth in Italy's Serie A.
The part rankings usually hide
Now the part almost no site publishes: most of this ranking is noise.
We ran a bootstrap with 2,000 resamples to estimate a 95% confidence interval for each competition:
| Competition | Matches | Advantage | 95% interval |
|---|---|---|---|
| Libertadores | 126 | +53.6% | +22.0% to +96.7% |
| Copa do Brasil | 134 | +44.0% | +10.8% to +88.9% |
| Série D | 592 | +43.1% | +26.9% to +62.0% |
| La Liga | 380 | +40.4% | +24.9% to +58.5% |
| Brasileirão Série A | 205 | +33.9% | +14.4% to +58.0% |
| Premier League | 380 | +24.7% | +10.9% to +40.9% |
| Championship | 557 | +16.2% | +4.2% to +28.6% |
| Saudi Pro League | 306 | +11.7% | −3.7% to +29.0% |
| Serie A (Italy) | 380 | +11.0% | −4.1% to +26.9% |
What this actually means:
The Libertadores interval runs from +22% to +97%. With 126 matches, you cannot claim the Libertadores has more home advantage than La Liga (+40.4%) — the intervals overlap almost entirely. What you can claim is that it has more than Italy's Serie A, because there the intervals barely touch.
The Saudi Pro League and Serie A intervals cross zero. Statistically, you cannot rule out that home advantage in goals scored is absent in those two competitions.
Comparing 3rd place to 7th place is meaningless. The middle of the table reshuffles every round. Only the extremes carry information.
This does not invalidate the table — it invalidates the naive reading of it. The difference between "the Libertadores has the highest home advantage" and "home advantage in the Libertadores sits somewhere between +22% and +97%, probably above average" is the difference between a decorative number and a usable one.
Why the Libertadores and Copa do Brasil top the list
We cannot prove causation from this data, but the plausible explanations are familiar: long, punishing travel; altitude at some venues; sharp climate differences between regions; crowds close to the pitch in many South American stadiums; and refereeing under local pressure. Copa do Brasil and Série D share the long-travel-within-a-continental-country trait.
Worth noting: the Libertadores, Copa do Brasil, Série D and Sudamericana are also the lowest-scoring competitions on the list (2.11 to 2.30 goals per match). These are tighter tournaments — and those are exactly where home advantage weighs most. In a cagey match, half a goal decides it.
What to do with this
If you read statistics to understand the game, the practical takeaway is this: a model that treats home advantage as a single constant across all leagues is wrong at both ends. It underrates the home side in the Libertadores and overrates it in Italy.
And the methodological point matters more than the table: whenever you see a ranking of averages with no sample size and no margin of error, be suspicious. With 100 or 200 matches, almost any ordering looks convincing and almost none holds up.
Method
- Sample: 4,563 finished matches (status FT, AET, PEN, AWD, WO) with a recorded scoreline, across 16 competitions.
- Metric: mean home goals divided by mean away goals, minus 1.
- Cutoff: competitions with fewer than 80 finished matches were excluded from the per-league breakdown.
- Intervals: non-parametric bootstrap, 2,000 resamples with replacement over each competition's matches, 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles.
- Limitation: the sample reflects the seasons present in our database at measurement time and is not balanced across competitions. Leagues with more matches have more stable estimates — which is why sample size appears in every table.
Per-match data is open on GolStats' match statistics pages.
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