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In sports,home is the place andvenue identified with asports team. Most professional teams are named for, and marketed to, particular metropolitan areas;[1] amateur teams may be drawn from a particular region, or from institutions such as schools or universities.[2] When they play in that venue, they are said to be the "home team"; when the team plays elsewhere, they are theaway,visiting, orroad team. Home teams wear home colors.
Each team has a location where it practices during the season and where it hosts games. This is referred to as thehome court,home field,home stadium,home ballpark,home arena,home ground, orhome ice.[3] When a team is serving as host of a contest, it is designated as the "home team". The event is described as a "home game" for that team and the venue that the game is being played is described as the "home field."[4] In most sports, there is ahome field advantage whereby the home team wins more frequently because it has a greater familiarity with the nuances of the venue and because it has more fans cheering for it, which supposedly gives the playersadrenaline and an advantage.[citation needed] The opposing team is said to be the visiting team, the away team, or theroad team.
In North American sports, a spectator can often tell which team is home by looking at the field of play. Often a home teamlogo, insignia or name is in the middle of the field, at center ice, midfield, or center court. Also, the logo, insignia or name may be found atop adugout inbaseball or in theend zone inAmerican football. On television station scoreboards in North America, the home team and its score are usually displayed to the right of or below the road team's score, with the reverse being true for association football displays.
There are many examples of sports teams being forced to play their home games away from their usual home venue for a variety of reasons.
Damage to a venue can be a major reason. InWorld War II, Englishassociation football clubManchester United's home ground,Old Trafford, was so badly damaged by bombing that for eight years all their home games were played atMaine Road, the home of rivalsManchester City.[5] Damage caused byHurricane Katrina in 2005 forcedAmerican football teamNew Orleans Saints to play all of their games in the2005 season away from their home stadium, theLouisiana Superdome.
Teams may be forced from their home stadiums for logistical and legal reasons. TheCOVID-19 pandemic impacted the pancontinentalUEFA Champions League andUEFA Europa League association football tournaments. Varying travel bans and quarantining rules between different countries acrossEurope meant that many teams were forced to host their home games in a different country as their opponents would not be able to enter jurisdiction where the game was due to take place. For example, in March 2021 thegovernment of Spain had imposed a ban on travellers arriving from the UK, soAtlético Madrid were forced to useArena Nationala inBucharest, Romania, to host English teamChelsea.[6] In 2010 the Canadian baseball teamToronto Blue Jays played a home series with thePhiladelphia Phillies in the Phillies'Citizens Bank Park while theG-20 Summit was being held near theRogers Centre in Toronto.
In baseball, sometimes, when teams are playing a makeup game from an earlier game postponed by rain, the game may have to be made up in the other team's stadium. An example of this occurred on September 26, 2007, with a game between theCleveland Indians, who were the "home" team, but the game was played vs. theSeattle Mariners inSafeco Field, in Seattle.[7]
Rules and conventions often apply to the choice ofhome andaway colors. InAustralian football, the home team traditionally wears their regular jumper and black (or colored) shorts, while the away team wears a lighter coloured variant of their jumper and/or white shorts. InAmerican football andice hockey, most home teams often wearuniforms that feature their official team colors, whereas the visiting team wears white or colors opposite of the home team's choice.[citation needed] On the other hand, in baseball and basketball, the home team will typically choose to wear the lighter colored version of itsuniform. Many teams have a home uniform which is mostly white and referred to as the "home whites".[citation needed]
The road team will generally wear a version of its uniform with one of the darker of its official colors as the main color, or in baseball with a grey main color referred to as the "road greys". The term "home whites" originated in the early days ofMajor League Baseball. Typically the visiting team had no access to laundry facilities and thus the players were unable to clean their uniforms on the road. By wearing grey or another dark color the visiting team was better able to conceal the dirt and grass stains that had accumulated on their uniforms over the course of the series. The home team, having access to laundry facilities, was able to wear clean white uniforms each day, hence the term "home whites".[citation needed]
Especially in team sports, but also ininternational sports (home represented by the home country), a "home" crew is assigned to cover all the home games, and sometimes the "home" crew travels on the road to cover away games as well. While it is generally accepted that a home broadcasting crew will talk more about the familiar home players, they are still expected to provide objective commentary of actual play on the field, especially with respect to analysis of contentious officiating decisions. When this line is crossed, crews are accused of being "homers" or of displaying "homerism".
In contrast, national broadcasting crews, especially those at the top of their network"s depth chart, are typically assigned to whatever games are expected to attract the largest broadcast audiences and do not specifically cover particular teams. These crews are held to the highest standards of impartiality and are likely to come under intense criticism if they express any sort of favoritism towards individual teams and/or players.
In online fan forums, "homers" are participants for whom the home team can do no wrong, and the away team can do no right. This is cognate with extremist forms ofpartisan politics.