There are even more advantages to be had.

1. On International games you are not going to suffer from Jet lag which can be a real issue especially when you are trying to perform at the highest level possible.

2. Depending on the game there are different sizes the field may have and still fall under the rules, so playing at home gives you advantage in the sense that you know perfectly the size of the field while the visitor may make several mistakes because the field is bigger or smaller than their own.

3. The weather can be a big influence in the games especially if there is some kind of condition that the opposite team is not used to experimenting, for example teams that play in a warm weather may have problems playing in colder weather.

4. The sea level can be a huge factor as well if it is really high and visiting players come from a place that is near the sea level, if the sport uses a ball then the ball will have a tendency to travel farther away and visiting players will experience fatigue faster due to the reduced levels of oxygen.

Very interesting thread, thanks!

In my opinion, all of your mentioned points can be reduced to this factor: "less stress"
Human minds tend to react with "stress" in unknown situations (foreign stadium, foreign locker, foreign people around them, ...). This behavior stems from a time when our urahns wandered around every day to look for food and death could have waited around every corner. The body is tense in a stressful situation, expecting dangerous situations where you have to flee of fight immediately, leading to the fact that your body wastes energy to keep this state. Of course, this behaviour was a life safer back then, nowadays its simply not so important anymore, there wont be any tiger waiting for you around the next corner

If you are familiar with your surroundings (stadium, locker, people) your body simply is not that tense and you don't waste energy for keeping your senses "stressed". So in my opinion, better preparation for important games without additional stress factors is an important point why there is a home advantage at all.

I think this has not yet been mentioned yet. In a way, a match is also a kind of a turf war. It seems to me that teams are also territorial animals. They won't just bow down to their enemies in their very own soil. I guess this is also another factor about home advantage. It is not just about the fans but also about the name of their home. In every battle, they are carrying with them the honor of their place. If a team wins a championship trophy, it is not just about the team proving their might, it is also about a city or a state or a country gaining honor and respect for the kind of athlete or sports warriors they have. That is why a defeat at home is much more bitter than a defeat in another territory. It hurts the team, their territory, and their pride.

It is a matter of the game if the factor of the home ground itself matters at all. I am sure it does for games like cricket, but I am definitely sure the effect of knowing the ground better than the opposing team is negligible for games like soccer, basketball, tennis and so on. The ground itself usually doesn't have a big influence on this games itself - at least not the fact that one teams knows it better than the other.

That is definitely true. Playing in front of your home crowd puts some additional pressure on you, but this is clearly outweighed by all the positive aspects home advantage brings.
I remember tennis player Samantha Stosur, who was Top10 player for several years. Now in tennis, there is not that much of an home advantage, since a lot of advantages don't apply here (it's really mostly the fans), but Stosur was always a nerve wreck when playing at her home Grand Slam in Melbourne. She just couldn't handle the pressure with all the Aussies expecting her to go deep and/or even win the tournament.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Stosur

She also did pretty poor at Wimbledon, which is a surprise regarding her playing style and Aussies normally doing very well on grass, but this is another story.


You can't deny the fact, that there is the factor home advantage. Just look at the records for Football, Handball, Basketball, Icehockey etc teams. 95% of them do better at home than they do in away games. When Liverpool plays ManCity at home, they definitely have higher chances of winning than playing @ManCity.

Interesting, thanks. Refs are also always a little biased towards the bigger, more well-known players/teams (without me having any data to back that up). Like for example, if Ronaldo gets tackled, the ref is more likely to blow the whistle, than when a 19-year old scrub gets tackled. As for the article mentioned above, now that I think of it, it definitely makes sense. I guess this is especially valid for possibly game-changing incidents like penalties, free-kicks near the box, handball etc. When 50,000 people scream "hand", the ref might be urged more to give a penalty for example. But with the introduction of VAR, this maybe does not have such a big impact anymore, since everything is reviewed.

I would also claim, that a ref is more likely to give a foul, when the fouled player is screaming loud and doing some Hollywood afterwards - even if there was no foul at all. Would be interested in some analysis about that

Since most sports events is postponed, now we have time for this interesting discussion.
When we talk about home court advantage, first thing which comes to my mind is support of local fans. But there is much more things which are ore or less important. In away games players are travelling by planes and buses, they spend time on airports and traffic jams. Offcourse it doesn't help to get rest and prepare for the game. On international games, time zone difference is also a factor.
While home team have advantages - players sleep in their own bed instead of hotel, eat common food, arrive to stadium like every day. They have common suroundings, same dressing room. In basketball even basket rims are different in every arena - it's big factor.
In football, quality of pitch is another factor. Maybe it's less common in top leagues when we almost all teams have top notch pitches, it's more about lower divisions and less popular leagues, when sometimes away team arrive to play in potato field. In some leagues, like in my country, several teams play on artificial turfs - it's huge advantage against teams which play and prepare for the game on natural grass. And vice versa.
On the other, home court isn't always is advantage, because players get additional pressure and players sometimes fail to handle it. First example which homes to my mind is Brazil football team in World Cup 2014. But it's not that frequent cases - there is not so many teams which play better away than at home.
I knew that pitches have different sizes, but didn't knew that such big difference is allowed. But I may be wrong, but at least in biggest leagues sizes of pitches are pretty much similar size and few meters difference isn't very big factor. Now I can't find all these dimensions compiled into single place and I'm lazy to check wiki page of every stadium.
It's interesting thing about Freiburg pitch, for me it's strange that's allowed on such big level competition.

It's huge factor and in past FIFA had banned games on high altitude, once Argentina lost 6:1 to Bolivia. It's very often to see Argentina or Brazil struggling against these teams and Bolivia and Ecuador are always trying to use this advantage.
Actually, it's not true, in Maltese Premier League there is 3 stadiums is used https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_Premier_League
But probably this fact doesn't makes big difference.

I think home field advantage is not that big factor in NHL (in NBA too) because of long regular season. Cost of loss isn't that big there, so this is why we see these upsets so often. Things usually change when playoffs begin.

This article gives reasons why the referee may be influenced. In my opinion, one of the main reasons is surely the audience. In the home stadium you automatically have 20k + people, who may not make your decisions and let you feel that with interjections and insults. The younger and unexperienced the referee is the more likely it is that he will not make any decisions that the home audience would not like.
The article further states that in stadiums with no running track between the audience and the pitch (like in Old Trafford) it is way more likely that the referee favours the home team. Very interesting stuff in my opinion and should definitly be considered in sports betting
 

Well, this is something I now disagree with in regards to the topic of this thread

In tennis there is no home advantage apart from the fans when you play in your home country. Even when playing in your country, you most likely have to go all through the stress that comes with NOT being at home with your regular routines. You have the same hassle with getting/flying there, you will live in a hotel etc. as all the other players. It's just the fans - and in this topic it's about additional factors of home advantage.

And for sure, there are players that perform better on hard/clay/grass, but this is not about home advantage - it's just the surface they prefer playing on. You could argue that a lot of european outdoor tournaments are being held on clay and since most european players naturally grow up on clay, this is sort of home advantage then. US players mainly perform poor on clay, because they grow up playing on hardcourts and thus nearly all US tournaments are played on HC. Same for british players and their grass courts. But then again, not all hardcourts are the same and not all clay courts are the same. Even the balls are different, which is something the players always notice (and which amazes me ).

In tennis, you often have players, that do very well in a particular tournament though, that isn't necessarily in their home country. Carlos Moya comes to my mind, who "always" won the ATP event in Umag. Or Alison Riske is always playing Top3 tennis in Shenzhen. These athletes somehow feel at home at these tournament.