Regional advantage in rugby sevens: Is there a home effect when nobody is home?

2026-08-17

AI Summary

This study investigates regional advantage in rugby sevens within contexts lacking formal home venues. Analyzing 2,672 matches, the research innovatively replaces traditional binary home-away variables with continuous measures of geographic, spatiotemporal, and cultural proximity within a symmetric team-match panel fixed-effects model. Results indicate that while aggregate regional advantage is statistically insignificant, substantial heterogeneity exists; specifically, certain teams exhibit performance declines correlated with increased travel distance and east-west time zone differences. These findings reveal the team-specific nature of regional advantages, offering novel empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives for understanding competitive performance in non-traditional home environments. This work thereby advances the literature on spatial factors in sports analytics by demonstrating how nuanced proximity metrics can capture complex performance dynamics absent in conventional venue-based frameworks.

Abstract

We study the existence of a \emph{Regional Differential} in rugby sevens: whether, in tournaments where no competing team enjoys formal home status, some national sides systematically over- or under-perform depending on \emph{where} the event is staged. Using the universe of 2672 men's and women's matches from international rugby sevens tournaments played between 2016 and 2025, principally the World Rugby Sevens Series, but also the World Cup Sevens and the Olympic Games, we replace the binary ``locality'' indicator of the classic home advantage literature with continuous measures of geographic, temporal, and cultural proximity between each team and the host country. We show that aggregate associations between proximity and performance (which appear large and highly significant in naive specifications) are almost entirely an artifact of \emph{team composition} and \emph{scheduling}: once team and opponent quality are absorbed through fixed effects in a symmetric team-match panel, no general regional advantage survives. However, this null aggregate masks substantial heterogeneity. For a well-defined subset of teams (most notably France, but also New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Kenya, Samoa, and Brazil), performance declines significantly and monotonically with the distance separating the host city from home. Some of the established southern-hemisphere powers (Fiji, South Africa, Australia, Argentina) are essentially distance-neutral. We further show that for some teams the gradient operates through east-west jet lag rather than pure displacement. The Regional Differential in sevens is therefore real but \emph{team-specific} rather than universal, a distinction obscured by pooled estimation.

Problem

• Regional Differential
• Rugby Sevens
• Home Advantage
• Geographic Proximity
• Team-specific Heterogeneity

Innovation

• Continuous Proximity Measures
• Team-Specific Heterogeneity
• Fixed Effects Panel Model
• Regional Differential
• Jet Lag Gradient