Is there any psych research on how and why home advantage helps sports teams? And why there are exceptions?

Question

Most sports teams in spectator sports with five-figure crowds seem to do better at home. Teams with small crowds, like lower division Scottish football, don't seem to, as a rule. Yet some sports teams with crowds of only 2000 also seem to do much better at home (e.g. Plymouth and Penzance at rugby).

Some players seem much more affected by crowd support than others.

Why?

Wow, Wayne! What do they say in Oz - good on yer, mate!

It's interesting that the subconscious mind doesn't seem to hear the word "no" in affirmations, as in "no forward passes".

Answer 1

Not to answer your question directly, but as a related aside. Football teams that play in red tend to do the best. Indeed England, who usually play in white, get better results when they play in red. The three most successful soccer teams, by far, in England are Manchester United (red), Liverpool (red) and Arsenal (red).
The British army had demonstrable psychological advantages when they war red tunics.
I would suggest that this is because red is the colour of anger and if you are up against red enemies, you anger instead of keeping your heads and sticking to effective tactics.

Answer 2

Would make a very interesting theisis ! and what an excuse to attend all those live games ! Many aspects of psychology could exist here, from the arousal-performance study as seen in the Yerkes-Dodson law 1908, where sporting performance is most desireable at a certain "optimal" level of anxiety - one could draw the correlation between sporting performance and arousal (crowd induced) levels.

I played professional Rugby League in Sydney Australia and can still remember knocking on from the kick off - unforgivable, with the opposition scoring shortly afterwards from a scrum win and series of penalties! That was the last chance I ever had !

A former team mate of mine took a guy out over the try line whilst he was competing for the football inorder to prevent a certain try thus losing the Grand final ! The other team were awarded a "penalty try" thereby winning the match, Jamie Ainscough as great as he was will always be remembered for that brain snap infront of 80,000 spectators and Millions World wide !

A home ground advantage always assist teams in higher competition, but sometimes adds to the pressure to perform if your not doing so well. Sports Psychologist instill positive imagery and use of key words (trigers) to assisit, gone are the days of mentally rehersing "no drop balls, no missed tackles" because you automatiically create what you think about most of the time through the "law of attraction".