The famous Europa – the princess from which Europe got its name!

In this video we talk about the famous Europa – the princess from which Europe got its name!

We start of by generally outlining her family tree and from there we explore her various available stories throughout Ancient Greece Mythology and History.

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Is Home Advantage Really an Advantage?

In all sports, teams strive to gain home field advantage. The consensus is that playing in the home stadium, in front of the home crowd offers a distinct advantage. In the 2012 Olympics, many feel that England’s success was due in part to their athletes competing on home soil and in front of the home crowd. In soccer, consideration of home field advantage is so great that away goals are given more weight in two-leg fixtures. Is the confines of the home venue truly an advantage or is this simply a misconception? Researchers from Spain and Portugal looked at 10 years worth of domestic league tables to find out if there is actually an advantage to playing at home.

The study included 10 years of domestic league competitions held in Europe (2000-2010). The analysis was limited to the highest league category in each of the UEFA countries. Their sample included a total of 111,030 matches in 52 countries. In short, the researchers noted the number of games won, drawn and lost by the home team. They then calculated to percentage of available points earned by the home team (3 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss).

The results showed that the home team earned an average of 55.6% of the available points, indicating a significant home advantage. In terms of individual countries, 32 of the 52 UEFA countries showed a statistically significant home advantage. The strongest home advantage was found in Bosnia-Herzegovina (76.1%). Other notable countries that had significant home advantages were, England (55.7%), Spain (55.5%), Germany (55.8%), Italy (56.0%) and France (56.8%).

A few countries had a home disadvantage, including Lithuania (49.1%), Northern Ireland (48.8%), Malta (48.0), Andorra (47.1%) and San Marino (45.5%). However, these disadvantages were not statistically significant.

When comparing home advantage over the 10-year study period, there is a trend for the advantage to lessen. During the first season (starting in 2000), the percentage of points won by the home team was 56.9%. In the final season (ending in 2010), the value was 54.8%.

They also used UEFA rankings over the 10 seasons to determine a strength coefficient for each country. As it turns out, the home advantage is slightly greater in the top 10 ranked countries than in the bottom 10. In fact, the top 10 countries all had statistically significant home advantages, whereas, only 1/3 of the bottom 12 showed this trend.

If we take the data from the article and look at the percentage of matches won, we find home team wins 47.2% of the matches played, draws 23.5% and loses 29.3%. That works out a home field wining percentage of 59.0% (draws count as a 1/2 win and 1/2 loss).

There are several reasons why one would expect a home advantage. Familiarity with the home venue, crowd noise and lack of travel are a few. In 2007, researchers suggested that for every 10,000 fans attending, there is an increase in 0.1 goals scored. Unfamiliar locker rooms, field sizes, altitude, local weather can also adversely affect visitors more so than the hosts. Some studies also suggest that there may be a home bias in officiating. Thus, it is not surprising that home teams earn more points than the visitors.

Back to the original question posed at the top of this post. Is home advantage really an advantage? The authors conclude that there is a significant home advantage in the highest leagues in Europe. Home teams earn slightly more than 55% of the available points and have a wining percentage of 59%. This trend has held for the past 10 years. Also, the top leagues tend to have a stronger advantage than the lower ranked leagues. So yes, home advantage is truly an advantage.

 

(SOURCES:

Garcia MS, Agular OG, Marques PS, Tobio GT, Fernandez Romero JJ (2013) Calculating home advantage in the first decade of the 21st century UEFA soccer leagues. Journal of Human Kinetics, 38: 141-150.

http://www.scienceofsocceronline.com/2013/12/is-home-advantage-really-advantage.html)

Messi’s sixth sense explained

Published: Tuesday 7 February 2012, 14.53CET

So acute is Lionel Messi’s vision on the football pitch that he seems to have eyes in the back of his head, but is there a scientific explanation for his sixth sense, asks Champions?

Watching Lionel Messi dribbling through a defence or playing a slide-rule pass through a narrow space at an acute angle is one of the most thrilling sights in football. It is almost as if he has a bigger picture of the game than anyone around him. Eyes in the back of his head, if you will.

Now academics in Germany and the Netherlands have decided to put this theory to the scientific test. “We were interested in the underlying mechanisms of expert performance in sport,” explains Professor Norbert Hagemann from the University of Kassel. “Footballers are active on a huge field and have to attend to, or view, so many people on the field that we believed the best player could attend to more players at the same time.”

In layman’s terms, the researchers believed the best players had a broader visual span that enables them to see more of the pitch and the position of their opponents and team-mates at any one time than less skilful players. To test this belief, they studied the behaviour of amateur footballers when they were shown various football situations. However, the results actually contradicted the theory.

“In general, we were not able to find a broader visual span in skilled players,” says Hagemann. “They do not extract information from a broader visual area. However, we found a longer fixed duration. Such skill-related differences in ‘gaze strategies’ are thought to be functional in terms of more efficient information pick-up.”

So while the best players may not have a greater field of vision than average players, they pick up more information from a single glance. This finding supports the ‘chunk theory’, based on the discovery that the best chess players could remember a board, not in terms of 32 pieces, but as five or six groups of pieces.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, has his own take on this phenomenon. Drawing on the experience of firefighters who can sense when a burning house is about to explode, he suggests they develop something he calls ‘expert intuition’, an instinctive method of solving a particular problem. Could this describe Messi’s innate ability to make the right run or play the right pass?

Players who are not as gifted as Messi could be trained to improve their ‘fixation duration’, but Hagemann is not convinced this will directly improve their performance: “The less skilled player has to learn the structure of play, the patterns of the movements and so on. They have to build a knowledge base that helps them discover the relevant information in the current situation. To train less skilled players, it would be more helpful to orient their attention to the relevant features of play. Fixation duration is a by-product of knowing where to attend.”

Whether you refer to this as a knowledge base or expert intuition, this quality helps more skilful footballers predict upcoming events much more precisely – the greater the knowledge base, typically the better the player.

“If the best footballer already knows what is going to happen then they will know where to direct their attention,” says Hagemann. “Players like Messi are great at decision-making. They have anticipation abilities that help them solve complex problems in the best possible way.”

Now the team are aiming to get to the bottom of the underlying mechanism that allows Messi to solve these complex tasks with such consummate ease. The defenders’ union will be waiting with bated breath to read their findings.

(source: http://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/news/newsid=1749111.html)