Why the Home Team Wins

The home team wins more than it should. Every league, every century. For a hundred years everyone said the same thing: the crowd lifts the players. Then someone checked 23,000 NBA games of free throws, and the players came out identical, home and away, 75.9 percent both ways. So who is the crowd actually moving? The one person in the stadium who is not allowed to care. Referees shown the same tackles with and without crowd noise called about 15 percent fewer fouls against the home side. Spanish injury time doubled exactly when home fans wanted more of it. And when 2020 emptied the stadiums, home advantage did not just shrink, it flipped. With: a referee in a spotlight, a headphone experiment, two identical free-throw numbers, a wave made of 40,000 faces, and the ghost games that settled a century-old argument. Subtitles available in CC.