The Harrying

It is 1069. William, freshly crowned, rides north.

He has conquered the south in a single afternoon at Hastings. London opened its gates. The earls submitted. But the north will not submit. The Danes have landed at the Humber. The Northumbrians have killed his garrison at York. Every mile north of the Trent is hostile ground - unfamiliar, cold, and increasingly indifferent to whoever sits on the throne in Westminster.

William's army marches through December. The muddy roads encumber. The swollen rivers impede. His men, many of them Norman knights unaccustomed to the English winter, are falling before they reach the enemy. They will suffer far less than anyone they encounter. The campaign that follows, the Harrying of the North, is not a battle. It is a policy. William orders the crops burned, the livestock slaughtered, the settlements razed. Historians estimate a hundred thousand dead, by famine mostly. The Domesday Book, compiled sixteen years later, still records vast tracts of Yorkshire as "waste." The north had every advantage: familiar ground, hostile winter, an army stretched far from its supply lines. It made no difference. Every king after William will understand: the further from London you go, the less the crown means.

Nine hundred and fifty-six years later, a Southampton coach pulls onto the A1 at 8am for the six-hour drive to Newcastle. The players will arrive stiff, eat a precooked meal at the hotel, and walk onto a pitch under the ale-sodden gaze of 50,000 expectant Geordies. Under the lights this evening, the cameras will be focused and a nation will be watching. The visitors will lose. They usually do.

This is a story about home advantage in the Premier League. It is also a story about crowds, weather, and what happens when someone has to travel a long old way to fight you in the cold.

The Premier League has hosted 4,451 matches across the last twelve seasons. In the most basic sense, home advantage exists: 44% home wins against 32% away wins. A gap, enough for a succession of great managers and unbeatable teams to understand, and rely on, this arithmetic.

For reference, winning 44% of all your games would put you 22nd on the list of Premier League managers by win percentage - between Keegan and Sir Bobby Robson.

Home comforts. Many forces shape it. William encountered three of them on the road to York. We start with the great equaliser.

The winter

It is January 2024. Burnley host Fulham at Turf Moor in heavy snow. The pitch markings vanish under the soft white. The linesmen, perhaps, guess. An orange ball skids where white ones roll. Burnley, playing at home in conditions they should know better than anyone, lose 2-0.

William lost more men to the English winter than to any army in the north. His Norman chevaliers, bred for Normandy's mild autumns, died of cold and dysentery on the march through Yorkshire.

The data says the same thing. On a clear day, or a cloudy one, or even in light rain, home advantage is unremarkable. The numbers barely move. Mild English weather is a neutral condition. But in heavy rain, the home team's Elo-adjusted advantage drops by 20 percentage points. In fog, by 19. In snow, by 16.

Home advantage is built from small familiarities: the dimensions of the pitch committed to memory, the recognisable angle of the mid-day sun, the way the ball moves on this particular cut of grass. Extreme weather erases all of it. When you cannot see the far touchline, it does not matter that you have seen it a thousand times before. The conditions reduce the game to its fundamentals and the fundamentals do not care whose home this is.

Forty-one matches in the dataset were played in heavy rain. Twenty-seven in fog. Ninety-three in snow. Perhaps such small samples are enough for uncertainty, but there appears to be none in the direction of the effect.

The garrison

It is March 2021. Anfield is empty. Liverpool, the reigning champions of the infamous Covid season, play Fulham in front of zero people. The Kop is a wall of red seats and silence. In the 45th minute, Mario Lemina puts the visitors from London ahead. The phantom faithful heave and pull and twist but it is no use. The ball cannot be sucked into the next by a willing Kop tonight. There is no sound, in fact, but the desperate cries from the sidelines to push up, to endure, to keep going. Liverpool lose 1-0 at home for the sixth time in succession that season.

William garrisoned every city he conquered. A castle is useless without men inside it, after all. The 2020/21 season proved the same thing: fortresses up and down the country were not their walls but the people that were meant to fill them. Covid emptied every ground in the country. Nearly 360 matches played to empty stands. Home teams won 38% of their matches, the visitors 40%. For the first time in the history of Premier League football, it was better to be the visitor.

When the crowds came back in 2021/22, home advantage returned with a finger-snap. By 2022/23 it had overshot: 48% home wins, the highest in the dataset. This rebound was sharp, the collective breath of the country no longer bated.

It is November 30, 1936. The Crystal Palace burns.

It has stood on Sydenham Hill for 82 years. A greenhouse the size of a cathedral. The secular temple of Victorian England. Six million people visited the Great Exhibition it was built to house. In 1894, they filled in the gargantuan fountain on the lower terrace and gave the people a football pitch. Twenty FA Cup finals were played on it. Winston Churchill drives out from London to watch it go up in flames. One hundred thousand people stand in the cold. The fire is visible from eighty miles away. By morning there is nothing.

The district kept the name. Its football club kept the name. Crystal Palace play at Selhurst Park, a mile away, under an identity borrowed from something that no longer exists.

Craven Cottage, the building, burned down in 1888. Fulham took the lease eight years later and have played there ever since, at a ground named after something that was ash before their first match.

Both clubs play at home to a place that isn't there. In twelve meetings, the home team has won once. Since 2014, Fulham have not beaten Palace at the Cottage.

That is the short end of the journey. The other tells a different story.

When the away team has travelled more than 300 kilometres, home advantage is at its strongest. The gradient between these two points is smooth and unbroken. Of everything in the dataset such as weather, crowd size, and kick-off time, distance is the only factor that holds as a clean, continuous line.

Five percentage points on the surface. Adjust for team quality and the gap stretches to 6pp. It is the oldest variable and the most persistent.

North

William's commissioners rode back south in the spring of 1070 with the north in ashes behind them. It took them months. They had won. The north had been destroyed to ensure it.

Divide the Premier League's grounds by latitude. Four bands, south to north. Control for team quality. Northern grounds show the strongest aggregate home advantage in the league: +3.3 percentage points above expectation. Manchester, Merseyside, Leeds, Sheffield, Burnley, Newcastle, Sunderland - the north as a whole outperforms.

The Romans went further north than William and were wise enough to stop. Hadrian drew a wall across the country at roughly 55°N and said: beyond this, we do not go. St James' Park sits five kilometres from its eastern end.

Newcastle's Elo-adjusted home advantage is +9.2%, across 203 home games and twelve seasons. Arsenal, Manchester City, and Liverpool post higher figures, but Newcastle is the strongest home ground among clubs whose quality alone does not explain the record. The furthest, consistently-present Premier League ground from London, by a significant margin, with a civic ritual for 52,000 souls that no model can quantify.

Home advantage is not a mystical property of familiar blades of grass or the recognisable aroma of the dressing rooms. It is a confluence of logistical challenges: the garrison, the winter, the journey. Take away the crowd and it vanishes. Add extreme weather and it erodes. Shorten the distance and the advantage thins. And occasionally, you get the spectacle of St James' Park at its most uninviting: six hours from London, 52,000 rapturous voices closing in around you, driving sleet causing attrition on both sides. We are awfully close to where we do not go.

So, come. March your team up the Gallowgate in January. See what happens.