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How Home Field Attendance Rates Affect the Home Team’s Performance By Brandon Koehler

For my final project, I researched how much a team’s home field attendance would affect its playing performance at home. In order to find out this information I collected data on all NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB teams’ home sellout percentages and home winning percentages for the past two seasons. I then compared these two numbers to see if the closer to a sellout, the better the team would perform. Null Hypothesis (Ho) – Fan attendance has no effect on a home team’s performance. Alternative Hypothesis (Ha) – The greater the home attendance is, the more the team will win at home. I then performed a two-proportion z-test as shown below: The conditions are met for conducting a two proportion z-test because: Mean Winning %: 58% Winning % Range: 100% Standard Deviation Win %: 16% Mean Sellout %: 87% Sellout % Range: 73% Standard Deviation Sellout %: 16% Mean Attendance:34,205 Attendance Range:45,752 Standard Deviation Attendance: 23,967 SD( p 1- p2)=sqrt((p1q1/n1)+(p2q2/n2)) sqrt((212.28*31.72/244)+(141.52*102.48/244)= 9.327
 * 1) Each individual trial is independent of one another
 * 2) I have sampled less than 10% of the entire population
 * 3) The sample conducted was random
 * 4) The same individual is not present in both groups
 * 5) There are two separate proportions



Equation of Least-Squares Line: HomeWinning%=0.279(%SoldOut)+34, r^2=0.085 Using this equation I found out: For every 1% increase in home attendance (average=342.05 increase) the home team’s winning percentage at home will increase by 0.3% (average=0.1266 win increase) In order to win one more game (2.4% average increase in winning ), a team’s home attendance must increase by 8% (2376.4 people on average) The r^2 value is close to zero showing that there is a correlation between home attendance and home winning percentage although it is very small. However if I collected a larger sample size, the r^2 value would have gotten closer to one.

Overall after conducting data on home field attendance and the home team’s winning percentage, it was found that the attendance of a team’s home field does affect its winning percentage. This is shown easily since the average home winning percentage among all teams is 58% which shows that the average team wins more games at home than away. However, the rate for the increase in the home winning percentage compared to the home attendance is that for every 8% increase/2376.4 people increase in attendance the home team wins another game. In conclusion, although very small, there is a clear relationship between the home stadium’s attendance and the home team’s winning percentage.