Hit or Myth: Teams struggle at the weekend after playing in the Champions League in midweek

Another Betting School article. This time one I originally wrote in December 2010. It talks about teams having to travel a lot and seeing if there is anything in it.

Travel Sickness

The first thing I need to say is that I live in Spain (the cold north part) as the next story may not make sense otherwise.

A few weekends back I was walking home on a Saturday late afternoon when I saw the Deportivo La Coruña coach pull up at a hotel near my flat and 2 minutes walk from the Sporting Gijón football stadium. Sporting were playing at home on the Sunday but to Real Madrid and it got me wondering what the Deportivo team were doing there. I got home and checked the fixtures and saw that they were playing away at Mallorca the next day. For those interested in Geography  Mallorca is an island nearly 500 miles off the Spanish East coast and Coruña is around 180 miles from Gijón.

I could see that they would have driven the 180 miles in the afternoon, spent the night in the hotel and then on the Sunday would get up and fly from Asturias airport to Mallorca. The flight would take about an 1½ hr and then the match kicks off at 5pm. Based on the location of Coruña I would guess they have to fly to well over half their away games per season so they should be used to air travel but even so it can’t be good preparation and air travel is tiring.

I started thinking about distances teams have to travel to play away games and then remembered the horrendous away record Newcastle had against London clubs that spanned a number of years as well as Sunderland’s poor form in the capital that they only broke when beating Chelsea this season. Could it be a coincidence that both these teams have further to travel to London than any other teams in the Premier League?

With this article I intend to see if there are any strategies that can be used based on distances teams have to travel and if it helps when making selections. The data I use comes from www.football-data.co.uk and spans 5 seasons from 05-06 to 09-10. The profit/loss is based on the Betbrain maximum home/away win odds from the football data files.

If we start with flying we `can test this by looking at teams based on islands and seeing how their home form is. The idea being that away teams have to fly to play them and could be disadvantaged.  Sticking to the bigger leagues the island teams I have found are shown in the table below:

If we look at the top line results based on Betbrain maximum home win odds from the football data files we straight away some interesting results:

Backing all teams from islands over the last 5 seasons would have returned an ROI of just over 8%. If we look at the breakdown by years you can see there have been a few losing seasons and the recent profits may have been based on teams like Mallorca having an exceptional season in 09-10.

If these teams are strong at home then the bias should also exist when they play away in that they have to do the travelling. Backing the home team when the away team was from an island produced the following results:

The theory holds up again. Nowadays some teams will be far better prepared for travelling and do it so often they are used to it. The bigger teams will be playing in European competition each season so doing a fair amount of air travel. These teams also have more money and would not be flying on the day of the game like Deportivo did. I went through a list of the teams in these leagues and excluded teams I thought had played a fair bit in Europe and were a big club in that country. The exclusions were Juventus, AC and Inter Milan, Roma and Fiorentina in Italy, Bordeaux, Lyon and Marseilles in France, Benfica, Porto and Sporting Lisbon in Portugal and Atletico and Real Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, Villarreal and Valencia in Spain.

The results with the exclusions are shown below:

Only two teams do not show a profit, the ROI has gone up and the results look very good.

The flight theory seems to work, so then I checked if general distance travelled can make a difference. As mentioned earlier Newcastle and Sunderland have a long way to travel to London and if we look at the results you would have made a nice profit backing the home team

Portsmouth is on the South coast and therefore even further for these 2 teams to travel so you would expect to see similar results. There are only 8 games to look at which is a few but backing Pompey each time would have led to a loss of -0.52 so nothing conclusive. As we saw with the Islands if it works one way it should work in reverse and therefore the London clubs should struggle against Newcastle or Sunderland.  Backing Sunderland or Newcastle in these games would have produced a very small profit, but a profit nonetheless, shown below:

Testing this further Spain is an easier country to use as it is so big. I grouped teams from the Northern regions (Galicia, Asturias, Canatbria, Basque Country and Navarra) together and then the same with the teams from the Southern-most region (Andalucia) of Spain as well. Any North v South match or vice versa would mean the opposition having to travel over 500 miles.  From the previous findings I would expect to see a profit for the home team when the visitor was from the other side of the country, but looking at the results this is not the case:

We are now showing a loss and if we look at the teams there seems to be little pattern in this. The Northern teams are:

Santander’s losses are very big as are Osasuna’s. The 3 most Westerly teams, therefore further from large cities/airports and more remote, are Sporting Gijon, Celta Vigo and Deportivo La Coruña who all show a profit.

The Southern teams are:

The losses here are bigger and it is hard to put a positive spin on them. The majority of the losses -12.32) are from games when Deportivo La Coruña travelled South and I would have expected them to have a poor record based on the fact they are right out in the North West corner. However, maybe the fact they have to travel at least 180 miles to any game means they are better travellers?

It is hard to take a positive conclusion from this. Maybe some teams are better travellers than others. This may be to do with how often they do it and what sort of budget they have.

However, there does seem to be something in the island idea and that looks the way to go. Backing the island teams at home seems especially profitable in the bigger, and more competitive leagues of Spain and Italy. If we exclude the games against the big teams I mentioned before it produces the following profits.

I would want to look twice before opposing any island team at home but away from home would see the value with the home team.