At Euro 2008, the soccer championship for European countries held every four years, this event, held jointly in two countries, means both Austria and Switzerland regard themselves as having the upper hand due to the "twelfth man" - home field advantage.

But does it really exist? Eva Heinrichs, a future diploma statistician at Technische Universität Dortmund, has scientifically tackled the issue and examined all games of the premier and second German national league as well as the Spanish, Italian and English premier leagues since 1963 - which is nice work if you can find it - and concludes it does exist, though it was a lot stronger in prior decades than it is today.

Greece was an 80-1 long shot to win Euro 2004 in Portugal, but win it they did, so home field advantage isn't everything. Today, it may even be skewing toward a negative.

In the premier league season of 1987/88, an average of 55.8 percent of all games was won by the home team but it went down to 47.8 percent afterwards. During the season 2006/07 that sank to 43.8 percent. That means that less than half of the games are still won on the home field – hardly a terrific home advantage. In this respect the premier and the second league show the same tendencies: home field advantages dropped at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Until then the home advantage had been significant.

But what are the reasons for the decline of the home advantage? Supported by Prof. Dr. Roland Fried and Prof. Dr. Joachim Kunert, Eva Heinrichs cited reasons for the reduction of the chances of the home team but could not come up with a cause.

Primarily, the number of goals during a game fell. In those earlier national league games an average of 3.5 goals were scored but in more recent years that number has dropped to less than 3 - but away goals remained the same while home goals dropped. That meant fewer home victories and more away victories and ties. For the Dortmund statistician this is proof that the larger contracts in soccer, and the increased competition and better overall players, has negated part of the home team advantage.

Eva Heinrichs also checked her findings on the European level and examined 45,996 games of the Spanish, Italian and English leagues based on the same statistic method (19,056 England, 14,580 Spain, 12,360 Italy). There it also shows that the home advantage is continuously getting smaller.

The number of away victories, away goals and ties increased and the number of home victories and home goals dropped. The Italian league is the only exception. In Italy the number of home victories has remained nearly the same and the other indices for a home advantage do not always correspond to the other leagues.

Heinrichs has an explanation: in the 1970s and 1980s the Italian league was famous for its defensive style. The absolute numbers and the relation of away and home victories or away and home goals show that the Italian soccer has simply adapt to the “European style” and now has more offense. So in Italy, the home advantage may be a myth – but it has been for a long time.

The key phenomenon related to home advantage remains unexplained. With statistic methods Heinrichs was able to clearly detect a level shifting in nearly all time series – the statistician calls it 'structural interruption' - and it occurred in all leagues at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, so something must have happened in European soccer at that time that influenced the home advantage in a negative (or positive with regard to the away team) way but there is no clear mathematical explanation for what that was.

So maybe it should be called the Away Team Advantage until science figures it out