Where does playing at home count most? 51 leagues, two seasons, measured
Home sides outscored their visitors in every one of the 51 leagues we measured: across 30,633 matches over two completed seasons they scored 23% more goals. How much more depends on where you look, from 45% in Brazil's Serie A to 3% in Qatar's Stars League. But a single season is a poor guide to which league is which.
Every league, side by side
The Americas at the top
The 5 leagues where home advantage was largest are Serie A (Brazil) +45%, Primera A (Colombia) +42%, Liga MX +39%, Liga Profesional Argentina +37%, Primera División (Chile) +33%, all of them in Latin America. Long journeys and, in Colombia, Mexico and parts of the Andes, matches played at altitude are the usual explanations; our data counts goals and cannot tell those reasons apart.
At the other end are Stars League +3%, A-League +5%, Premier League (Egypt) +7%, Serie A (Italy) +10%, Ligat Ha'al +11%, Pro League (Saudi Arabia) +12%. In Qatar the gap between home and away is close to nothing.
The big five
Among the five biggest leagues: La Liga +32%, Ligue 1 +23%, Bundesliga (Germany) +15%, Premier League (England) +15%, Serie A (Italy) +10%. Only La Liga is clearly above the all-league figure; Serie A sits in the bottom 4 of all 51.
The Premier League shows why two seasons are better than one. In 2024-25 home sides scored just 6% more than visitors; a season later the figure was 25%.
One season is a poor guide
If a league's home advantage were a fixed property, the leagues with the biggest edge one season would have it again the next. They mostly do not. Across the 51 leagues, the figure in one season and in the next correlate at only 0.33. Some of the difference between leagues is real, but a good part of any single season is luck. The largest swings:
- Ligue 2: +40%, then +8%.
- Finnish Premier League: +31%, then +2%.
- Championship: +40%, then +16%.
- HNL: +45%, then +22%.
Chance alone moves a league's figure a long way. A typical league here has about 756 home and 640 away goals across two seasons. In a league that size whose true home edge is 23%, luck alone would put the measured figure anywhere between 11% and 37%, and that is the narrowest the band can be. Leagues a few points apart in the chart above are not really different; the ends of it are.
This season so far
A few months into a season, a league's numbers are noisier still. In the matches we have called since 19 July, in the 20 leagues with at least 80 of them, 2 have away sides scoring more than home sides, which none of the 51 did over two full seasons:
- Eredivisie: home sides 14% fewer goals than visitors this season (90 matches), +32% over the two seasons before.
- Primeira Liga: home sides 13% fewer goals than visitors this season (81 matches), +24% over the two seasons before.
- Serie A (Italy): home sides +1% this season (88 matches), +10% over the two seasons before.
- 2. Bundesliga: home sides +43% this season (81 matches), +21% over the two seasons before.
- Liga I: home sides +64% this season (100 matches), +28% over the two seasons before.
None of these is yet evidence that something has changed. At around 80 to 248 matches, swings this size are what a league produces by chance. Across all of them together, home sides have scored 21% more than visitors, close to the two-season figure.
What it means for our model
Since 22 September our model has used each league's own home advantage: the ratio of home goals to away goals over the two completed seasons in the chart plus the current season so far. Before that, every league got the same figure. We also looked for clubs whose home record is stronger than their league's from one season to the next, and found nothing steady enough to use, so the edge is set per league, not per club.
How has it landed? In the 1,349 league matches we called from 22 September to 28 October, we gave the home side 41.7% on average and home sides won 43.6%. On that many matches the margin is about ±2.6 points, so the model is close, if anything a touch cautious about home teams.
The table above says where it can still improve. Because one season is a poor guide, a league's own figure carries some luck with it, and a model that takes it at face value carries that luck too. The fix is to pull each league part of the way towards the all-league figure, more for small leagues and less for large ones. We have not tested that yet; when we have, the methodology will say what changed, and the track record will show whether it helped.
How this was counted
Goals at 90 minutes. League matches only, no cups and no national teams. Each league's last two completed seasons, from our data provider, API-Football. The season-so-far figures and the check on our model use the matches our model predicted before kick-off and their results, up to 28 October 2026. Our history file records goals and draws but not wins, so the two-season figures measure home advantage in goals.