Re-assessment of home advantage in Spanish handball: comment on Gutierrez, et al. (2012)

Because of problems with a previously published study, a re-analysis of data relating to home advantage in handball in Spain was made. The overall home advantage for 10,536 games played over 11 seasons (1997-98 to 2007-08) at the top two levels of play for both men and women was 60.4%. It was significantly higher for men (61.6%) than for women (59.2%). Contrary to a conclusion in the previous paper, it was also significantly higher for play at Level 2 (61.3%) than at Level 1 (59.4%), representing the top two divisions of play for each sex. A three-way factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was no difference between seasons, nor an interaction between seasons and gender as claimed previously. For individual teams, there was a clear negative correlation between home advantage and ability, as quantified by the overall performance of each team each season. This reversed the previous conclusion of a positive correlation. Because the previous study incorrectly claimed no prior research had been done on home advantage either in handball or between sexes, a review of the literature relating to these topics is included.