I never pay for an extra Home Bonus. The cost is prohibitive.

Furthermore, I do not even consider for a second whether my match is home or away. Its an irrelevance to me.

I could be wrong. I shall do some research in coming days to try find out.

The conclusions may lead to a suggestion for the default home bonus to start far higher than the current 8. Perhaps 13 as default, with a payment to go up to a 20 home bonus.

60% of English football matches are won by the home team, I read recently.
It used to be 70%.

The home fortresses of sport?

Celtic Park Glasgow
(Until Barcelona match this month) Celtic had NEVER lost at home in the Champions League. Compare that to their away record in same competition where Celtic have NEVER won - 16 defeats and 1 draw. A loud home crowd at Celtic must take part of that credit to give the home team an obvious advantage.

Manchester United, Old Trafford
Champions League defeat to Fenerbahce in 1996 ended United's 40-year unbeaten home run in Europe, a record preserved in the previous season with a rare Peter Schmeichel goal against Rotor Volgograd in the Uefa Cup.

New Zealand Eden Park, Auckland
The All Blacks have broken rugby union's record with 26 consecutive home wins since 2003. At Eden Park they are unbeaten in 18; they will enlarge the stadium for the 2011 World Cup rather than move to a new purpose-built plot.

Pakistan National Stadium, Karachi
Pakistan's cricket team were unbeaten in Karachi in 34 Tests from 1955 to 2000. Nasser Hussain's England ended the 45-year run, but Pakistan then went another seven years without defeat there.

Greece Olympic Stadium, Athens
Fani Halkia's 400m hurdles triumph was one of six Gold medals for Greece at the 2004 Games in Athens. Competing on home soil, the country had its best tally since the previous time the competition was held in Athens, in 1896.
Coincidence?

I posted this on the MSWL Notebook page in January 2007

A couple of months ago Mark Creasey commented that 3 of the 4 home teams paid for a home bonus and failed to win their AP Cup game. I e-mailed Al saying, "I never pay for a home bonus in MSWL or SESL because I don't think it's worth it." I then mentioned the old Olmec code and gave some figures and wondered if something was worth looking at. Al sent me the relevant code.

What does Home Bonus do? Simply adds the figure to your DEF and OFF. The Home team gets a HB of 8 anyway for free. It might not seem like much but I've been working through some figures using Excel and, as an example, if two identical teams had GP=42.6, DEF=118.31, OFF=160.96 without the HB then the home team has an 8.58% chance of a shot and the away team 7.05%. This is a 22% advantage to the home team as is pretty typical. With a HB of 13 it becomes 9.09% to 6.65% or 37% advantage.

So Home Bonus definitely makes a difference as it will mean around 8 shots to the home team and 6.5 to the away and this changes to 8.5 to 6 with the extra 80k paid (give or take and over a lot of games).

Is it worth 80k for half a shot? And with a HB of 10 you'd get maybe an extra shot every 5 games on average.

With the old system it probably was worth it as this rounded percentages down to the next whole number: 8.58% became 8% and a number from 1 to 100 was rolled. It would take a HB of 13 to get this to 9%. However the away sides chance would be 7% and reduce to 6% with a HB of 9. A HB of 10 would perhaps affect 1 match in 10 but 10k is a small price to pay.

With the new system 1 to 10000 is rolled so there's no big jump in chances. I'm not sure a HB of 10 is worth it now and I don't think I'd pay 80k for one extra shot (except maybe in a must win game).

A made up example:

In the above tables the figures on the left are GP, DEF and OFF for both teams with HB of 8 already added to team A. The upper table is with Team A at home, the lower with Team B with the home bonus figured in. The increase and decrease percentages are typical as HB is increased. If a team started with a low chance of a shot then these increase/decrease more (because adding 5 to an OFF of 70 makes more difference than to adding 5 to an OFF of 170) but 110% of 3 chances is only 3.3 chances. With high OFF teams the increase/decrease percentages might be smaller but can mean one more shot for you and one less for him with a HB of 13.

Jackie just posted up some figures showing Home teams win about 57% of matches which I'd say was in the margin of error for a 60% target.

Also I'm not sure I'd want paying for a few extra HB points making a huge difference.

Having said that I dont think I can recall using extra HB points for a couple of seasons now.

GMcD.

I used HB but only for two of my games in the cup. It may have made no difference, but then again, maybe that's why I got through vs. St Johnstone.
Only got a draw vs. DEV, but that was more than I expected, so maybe it helped there too.
Don't fancy forking out over 1000k a season just to get an extra 5 onto Off and Def in all my league games.

Generally.....

Home teams enjoy familiar dressing room and surroundings.

Home teams enjoy no long travel to matches or hotel stays.

Home teams enjoy being less tired as maybe not slept in a hotel.

Home teams enjoy more vocal support from home fans.

Home teams enjoy a ref being influenced in their favour (perhaps)

so SESL home teams should be expected to win their home matches.

I would vote for a home bonus of 8 rising to 10 perhaps as minimum,
with maybe a 10 > 16 range on option.

Don't forget that over half the referees are Homer refs and so the home sides will risk more aggressive players and this gives them a built in advantage anyway.

My first thought on this straight away was that the current default of 8 is perfectly fine (I would guess that most teams use this most of the time).

I've done some digging looking at the home win % this yr in the Premiership and the av is a 46.9% - this compares with AI bosses av of 43% in S19 in SESL. The full stats are detailed on the Blog/Journal on the SESL website.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to see if this % is consistant across other divisions, recent seasons etc if I get a chance.

Dan (BUC).

The doubling cost for going up each level of Home Bonus is hugely prohibitive.
Given that it is supposed to signify advertising spending to bring in extra fans, where are the extra fans in gate receipts?

But that is an aside, it is almost never worth spending the 80k for HB13, the bonus gained is minor over the 10k spend of HB10 which is usually all that is needed for that slight edge.

I used HB a few times this season (home against jammy Steve) where the expected stats of the opponent and my own stats suggested that it was worth an extra shot either way to spend a little bit more.
But as Steve has already pointed out, since the shot percentage doesn't round down anymore that is hugely irrelevant these days anyway, getting an extra half a percentage point.
I will continue to consider spending 5 or 10k if it will give me an advantage, just as I consider playing aggressive players or using marking if it will give me an advantage.
But the latter pairing are more likely to see game time as they actually work (sometimes)

Home Bonus... is a waste of money for season 20.
I actually once tried to use a spreadsheet to keep track of my teams CP/TP expenditure in SESL after reading that someone did that. It lasted 2 sessions of updating before I finally realised it's more hassle than it was worth sitting on my desktop asking to be updated. The website does all that for me... (thank you AL )

In my formative season's of OLMEC (before I joined SESL), I gathered advice from a guy who publicly 'traded' spreadsheets to calculate all manner of shots, saves, bookings win/loss ..blah.. ..blah.. ..blah.. (He is not a current Manager of ANY OLMEC team)

I took his advice, but latterly not from his spreadsheets.
His gut instinct was always, and I mean ALWAYS more help than his 'sheets advice.

The reason I mention this on the subject of home bonus?
Home Bonus, to most teams in SESL (90%), gives absolutely no valuable increase per Kilo Dollar spent as opposed to spending your Kilo dollars elsewhere.

ie. If you are up against a team who have any/many more SL28+ players;
Home Bonus is money down the drain, pick a tactic/lineup to counter them, because an extra SL or 10 via HB is a waste of your money and time picking that lineup.

This equates to season 20 only, as the reduced CP/TP available in auction this season, will see a significant reduction in those "1.75ers" we all dread, and yet have an answer too... but HB is waste this season..

but please don't take it from me, spend your cash as you see fit! And spend the odd 80k HB against Greenock Morton, as I will only take that as a compliment, thankyou please!

Post of the month above....

and its only the 3rd day of the month.