This year's collegiate national football championship will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, at the usual home of the Arizona Cardinals. Neither competitor, Florida or Ohio State, is playing on its home field, so in principle the game should be an even match. Indeed, neither team has lost a home game this year, with Florida's lone loss coming at an away game in Auburn.
How big is the home field advantage? In the English Premier Football League (the other football), the home team wins 66 percent of the time. The home field advantage has been attributed to everything from understanding the local turf conditions to crowd intimidation of game officials. But Nick Neave and Sandy Wolfson suspected another factor may underly the phenomenon: testosterone. Animals (including humans) display more aggression when they naturally have higher testosterone levels, such as during adolescence and mating season. Might football players also behave more aggressively when defending home turf? And might testosterone levels rise accordingly?
Neave and Wolfson tested 17 members of an English club team before home and away games. Each player provided saliva samples and filled out a simple emotion questionnaire. Among the 10 players who took the field during both games, testosterone levels in the saliva were significantly higher before the home game (9.93 ng/dl) than the away game (5.79 ng/dl). There were no significant differences in any of the self-reported emotions, ranging from calmness to enthusiasm.
But perhaps players simply felt the home game was more important because of anomalies in the schedule. Or possible some external factor was at work. So Neave and Wolfson tested players from another team. This time they asked each player which team was their biggest rival. The players were tested before home and away games with this team, and another, different team, as well as before a regular practice session.
Here are the results:
Testosterone levels went up for the bigger rival, but were still not as high as when the players faced a lesser rival in a home game. Again, there were no differences in self-reported emotions for any of the games.
Although the these two studies cover only six different games, the results are quite impressive -- and statistically significant. While it's possible that some difference other than home / away accounts for the large differences in testosterone levels, the authors have controlled for an impressive array of possible explanations: the crowds at all these games were small, the readings were taken before the games so actual game results should not have been a factor, and the home and away games were against the same team in every case. Neave and Wolfson interpret the data as suggesting that players' testosterone levels are naturally elevated when they are "defending" their home "territory." It's possible that seasonal variations or some other factor could account for the differences, but the this is contradicted by the fact that training levels of testosterone, taken both at the beginning and end of the season, were not significantly different.
Will testosterone levels make the difference in the American college football championship just four days from now? Possibly, but if there are variations in those levels, they won't likely be due to a home-field advantage.
Neave, N., & Wolfson, S. (2003). Testosterone, territoriality, and the 'home advantage.' Physiology & Behavior, 78, 269-275.
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It is not obvious to me that aggression is an advantage. There are many sports -- basketball, for example -- where aggression is a drawback, especially on defense, where a conservative, controlled style of play is much more effective. In fact, I would verture the brash generalisation that aggression is an overall drawback to defenses in all sports: pass rushers get too far downfield to defend the screen or a run inside, soccer players foul their assignments in the box by tacking too recklessly, defenders trying to clear the front of the net on a power play get called for cross-checking, a guard steps into a passing lane gambling for a steal but winding up with air....
I don't know anything about the biology of testosterone (I am skeptical about the testosterone = agression equation) but I do know sports, and what I know tells me that aggression causes as much problems for athletic performance in a team context as it fixes.
Psychology Today wrote up a study that had similar results (http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20061227-000001.xml) working with a Canadian hockey team. They also discussed a study that looked at testosterone levels in owners of competition dogs, and found that men whose testosterone levels were high before a competition were not as nice to their dogs after a loss. (In fact, they were more likely to be physically aggressive with their dogs.) Women and men with low-testosterone levels prior to competition were more likely to be soothing and sympathetic to their dogs.