Home advantage (HA) has recently been reported to be frontloaded in the NBA (Jones, 2007) and NHL hockey (Jones, 2009). HA exists in all professional team sports, but is most pronounced in soccer (Pollard, 2006). The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether HA in professional soccer is also frontloaded. Further, the effect of different levels of play and the hypothesis of psychological momentum will also be examined. Internet data on all goals (N=3423) scored in seasons 2009 and 2010 of Norwegian top league (NTL) and seasons 2008/09 and 2009/10 of English premier league (EPL) were used. HA was calculated using goals scored and was expressed as home goal percentage (HGP). HA will be considered frontloaded if HA in first goals is larger than in subsequent goals and amounts to a large part of HA in complete matches. The significance of the difference between two independent proportions was tested by a chi-square analysis. An alpha value of < 0.05 was used in all tests. The results showed that HA in first goals (lowest=58.88% in EPL season 2008/09 and highest=61.64% in NTL season 2010) is overwhelmingly significant (P<0.001) in all four seasons. Table 1 shows that mean HA in first goals was consistently larger than in subsequent goals, but the difference was not significant. Mean HA in complete matches was 62.37% in NTL and 60.87% in EPL. Thus, HA in professional soccer is heavily frontloaded as HA in first goals comprises of over 85% of the HA in complete matches. A contribution of HA in first goals to HA at the end of the match was somewhat larger in EPL (88.50%) compared to NTL (86.58%). Further, the momentum hypothesis was rejected in both NTL (P<0.001) and EPL (P=0.004). Only home teams scored more subsequent goals when they scored first goal.
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