Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
In sports, there is something known as the "home advantage" or "home field advantage". As the name itself explains, this is an advantage that is gained by a team playing in their own home field, court, or stadium.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.There are a number of advantages that may come with playing on familiar turf, though studies of sports matches have found it may be more to do with referees making more calls in favor of the home team than crowd support, or familiarity with the lumps and bumps of the now widely uniform pitches.
As well as this, factors like jet lag and the tiredness that comes with traveling also take their toll on traveling teams, which can then be recouped during the home games.
One team that arguably has quite a big advantage from playing at home, and no huge disadvantage when playing away, is the Bolivian national football team. When playing at home, they have the advantage of being able to breathe quite normally, which might not sound like much, but is a pretty tasty perk when your opponents are struggling for oxygen.
How big of an advantage do they get? In general the home field advantage can be substantial in football, or "soccer" if you must, with some teams winning up to 70 percent of the games they play there.
Bolivia do not win this many games at home, and in fact have a 49 percent win rate when playing there in World Cup qualifiers. However, this compares with their away win rate of 4 percent. Playing at home increases their win rate by a whopping 45 percentage points. In 30 years, they hadn't won an away qualifier, whilst at home against Brazil in 2009 they were able to secure a 2-1 victory.
So what is the secret? A pitch with an in-built maze that only they know the solution too? A local who really knows how to time yelling "psych"? Cheerleaders who are dogs, and the dogs attack? None of these are necessary when you are used to altitudes the Bolivian national football team are used to.
As mentioned above, the key is to starve your opponents of oxygen. Whilst that is not the goal of the Bolivian football team, it doesn't hurt them that they are used to playing at altitudes most would consider a "decent skydiving height". For a long time, the team held their home games at Estadio Hernando Siles, aka La Paz, a stadium that stands around 3,637 meters (11,932 feet) above sea level. At those elevations, it is pretty common for people who are not used to it to suffer from acute mountain sickness (AMS).
"AMS is common at high altitudes. At elevations over 10,000 feet (3,048 meters), 75 percent of people will have mild symptoms," Princeton University's Outdoor Action Program explains.
"The occurrence of AMS is dependent upon the elevation, the rate of ascent, and individual susceptibility. Many people will experience mild AMS during the acclimatization process. Symptoms usually start 12-24 hours after arrival at altitude and begin to decrease in severity about the third day. The symptoms of Mild AMS are headache, dizziness, fatigue, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, nausea, disturbed sleep, and a general feeling of malaise."
The reason is simply that the air pressure is lower there. Not that it is the first thing on footballers' minds, but they would also struggle to boil an egg under those conditions.
While the Bolivian team is used to playing at these altitudes, other teams are not, and have regularly complained of an unfair disadvantage whilst playing at these heights.
Following one 2017 football match, for example, Brazil's Neymar wrote that it was "inhuman to play in these conditions," adding that the "pitch, altitude, ball ... everything is bad", with an accompanying image of teammates breathing on tanks of oxygen.
In 2007, FIFA got themselves involved with the situation, after Brazilian club Flamengo decided they would no longer play at this altitude, following a game where their players needed supplementary oxygen to function. FIFA decided to ban matches being played at heights 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) or more above sea level.
Whilst aimed at protecting the health of the football players involved, rather than perceived cheating, the decision did not go down well with then president Evo Morales, who told reporters, "This is not only a ban on Bolivia, it's a ban on the universality of sports".
Retired footballer Diego Maradona, who famously popped one in using his hand during a quarter-final against England and got away with it, was enlisted by Morales to protest against the ban, which affected other teams with stadiums at similar heights. The team of retired Argentinian stars were able to beat the Bolivian football team 7-4 in an hour-long game.
“I speak for all of Argentina when I say that we do not fear the altitude,” Maradona told the crowd at half-time, adding, "all of us have to play where were we were born, my brothers and sisters".
The ban did not last long, with FIFA raising the height to 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) in 2007, before suspending the ban altogether in response to South American lobbying.
Since then, the Bolivian team has moved their official stadium to Estadio Municipal in El Alto, standing a whopping 4,150 meters (13,615 feet) above sea level.
Whilst the Bolivian response "se juega donde se vive" or "we play where we live" is a reasonable one – and after all, sports are games, not of any real importance – the German football site Kicker points out they also have Santa Cruz de la Sierra. This is the second largest city in Bolivia, lying at a more-comfortable-for-others height of under 500 meters (1,640 feet) above sea level, and conveniently containing the country's largest stadium.
They are not cheating, however, with no rules restricting altitude currently in place. It's not their fault if other teams cannot function without adequate oxygen, is it?
