Efeito da distância de viagem dos visitantes em estatísticas e resultados de jogos na Copa Libertadores da América

Abstract

The Copa Libertadores da América (CLA) is the main football competition between professional clubs in South America. Since it is a continental competition, away clubs are required to face long travel distances. In addition, there is a difficult logistics of travel modal, remote regions and altitude. Therefore, CLA clubs may face problems in providing the best preparation conditions for their teams, and thus face problems related to fatigue and performance in-game. Thus, it could be hypothesized that these long trips would be directly influencing the final result of the game as previously demonstrated in the literature with a strong rate of home advantage. Thus, the objective of the present study was to analyze the effect of the visitor's trip on game statistics and final game results with reference to the success of the home team in the CLA. The data were obtained by summarizing public portals with free access and official CONMEBOL portals (2018-2019 seasons). After considering the exclusion criteria (impugnation, “derby” and “no fans”), 222 games were modeled by binary logistic regression (home teams’ success/failure, ref=yes). Variables related to the displacement of the away team and altimetry of the place of dispute [“visitors travel distance” and “delta altitude”] were imputed in the model; related to the arbitration sanctions of visitors [“yellow card”, “red card”, “fouls”, “penalties committed”]; and those of the players' tactical performance [“ball possession”, “finishes”]. The main findings of the present study pointed out that the highest odds ratios for predicting the occurrence of success (i.e., home wins) were “away teams' red cards” (167%; p=0.02); and “penalties suffered by home team” (112%; p=0.03). Visitors' travel distance reached an influence of 15% (p=0.04). Visitors' travel distance only achieved significant simple linear correlation with “finalizations of the principals” (rho=0.14 [95% CI=0.01.0.27], p=0.04). In this way, predictors related to the away teams' arbitration sanctions seem to have a greater intervening magnitude in the final result of the game. Visiting teams should seek better travel preparation and logistics strategies to have better performance, primarily behavioral and/or defensive tactics. Future studies should study the likely effect of domestic arbitration bias on the CLA.