MLS Home Field advantage

**danshan11** · 07-24-18, 10:03 AM

nobody has anything for this come on folks!

**PeterGans** · 07-24-18, 02:44 PM

I can not help you directly but I can help you get the answer yourself.

1) https://www.soccervista.com/USA-Majo...18-853453.html shows the average homefield advantage for MLS soccer. You can calculate total point earnings per game at this site too. Draw-prob. is 22%, so we got 78% wins. Point average is 22%*1+78*3 = x points. As you can see on the website home team gets ~1.8 points so you can guess how strong homefield advantage may be. I am sure you can calculate it out of those numbers, unfortunately I have to do othe stuff myself so I can not look deeply into it.

2) Homeadvantage variance has been calculated by more complex factorial and other mathematical simulations. Obviously it does exist on most leagues on the planet, but the problem is the variance of the average can be really big. It can easily be the case, that one or two teams in a league actually have a homefield disadvantage while another team might have a much bigger than average homefield advantage.

3) Putting this together, I would never recommend any betting system based on homefield advantage except you really dive into it with the deep mathematics. But this is not mathematics like counting some goals, wins and doing the average. You actually need to factorize a poisson likelihood and do some more computer stuff. If you want to do that I can help you out with some more links. If you dont want to do that, I would not recommend basing any assumptions on homefield resulting in a bet.

**danshan11** · 07-24-18, 08:05 PM

Thanks Peter what I did is I just averaged out the line for home games and away games for all the MLS teams over the past 5 years and got the difference, it seemed to work pretty effeciently, thanks though!

**PeterGans** · 07-25-18, 02:07 AM

Oh you got a database of past lines? Thats really beautiful and great. You can test some betting systems with that. But it can be dangerous to model things from past results and extrapolate to the future. Great :-)

**danshan11** · 07-25-18, 09:33 AM

I dont have a betting system for it. I am just trying to figure the general home field advantage in the MLS, thanks anymore help would be greatly appreciated

**Waterstpub87** · 07-25-18, 11:11 AM

Originally posted by danshan11

I dont have a betting system for it. I am just trying to figure the general home field advantage in the MLS, thanks anymore help would be greatly appreciated

Take the win %s of home vs away across teams for the last 10 years.

**danshan11** · 07-25-18, 11:15 AM

and its some crazy number
1.95 and 3.45 decimal
that cant be are you serious, these are 3 way numbers

**PeterGans** · 07-25-18, 02:40 PM

Homefield advantage does not mean that a team only wins more games. It may also mean that it will draw more games against tougher opposition. That is part of the problem.

Now that I think about it,... what do you actually want? If you want to know the effect of homefield advantage you need to factorize a poisson likelihood. Then you will see how big an effect it is and for how much goals it accounts and how it changes the probability of a neutral setup to a homeground setup.

But that is not easily done, I can promise you that, I did all of it (just as part of other work). You will not get an easy answer. I would think you would need to put in good 20-50 hours of work. If you are not new to computers. You will need to learn python or mathematica for it.

Or, as an alternative, you could use Premier league numbers for some random seasons in the past. There is a publication where a guy did this exact thing. You could screw around a bit with the numbers and maybe get an educated estimate, just by trying to move some numbers around to reflect the MLS. That is maybe the best chance you have.

**danshan11** · 07-25-18, 04:25 PM

thanks for the replies
I am trying to get a base number
Example
Toronto +150 3 way neutral field
what would that same match up be at home
Toronto -150????
that is what I want a base number so I can say I think detroit is 20 cents better than ottawa so detroit -120 neutral field and now since they are playing in detroit what will the line be?

**PeterGans** · 07-26-18, 02:40 AM

Write down the poisson formula where greek lambda is goal intensity for one team. And the other team too. Create a table of results where the sums of the right fields are the win draw lose %. Factorize (additive) the home teams lambda to home adv + expected goals. away teams to expected goals. Expected goals being the same for both sides. Adjust all factors until you got the mls reflected. Then write down the poisson equation again just with the homeadvantage as lone factor in greek lambda. This will be the goal difference from neutral to home and the determining factor of what you want to achieve.