The data on Mexico’s World Cup home advantage - and why England might be just the team to win at the Azteca

England are widely expected to struggle in their next World Cup match against Mexico, in Mexico City.

The game, which kicks off at 1am UK time on Monday, will be played at the Azteca stadium, where the hosts do have a frighteningly good record.

This is not just because there might be fireworks outside the England players’ rooms the night before, because Mexico are a good team, or because there’s likely to be a ferocious atmosphere from the home crowd.

The most famous challenge comes from a different kind of atmosphere, because the Azteca is 2,240m above sea level, where footballs move differently, and breathing—let alone elite sport—is much more difficult for people who aren’t used to it.

But some number crunching suggests Mexico may have an unusually strong reason to fear England too. Because statistically, which is how we like to look at things at Full Fact, the Three Lions are arguably the world’s best away team.

What the data shows us

Firstly, to be clear, Mexico really are unusually strong at the Azteca. They’ve reportedly won 70 of the last 89 competitive games there, and lost only two, neither of them in the World Cup.

But this isn’t just a matter of how often they win. Mexico is a member of the football confederation Concacaf, which includes teams in North and Central America and the Caribbean, whereas England is part of UEFA, which represents Europe. This means most of these teams’ competitive matches are against completely different opponents, making the simple number of wins not a like-for-like comparison.

Instead, it makes more sense to look at how each team’s home and away records compare. And rather than just counting wins, losses and draws, it’s better to count goals. So a 1-0 win is worth a goal difference of +1, a draw 0, a 1-3 defeat -2, and so on. This captures both the result and the scale of it together.

So we analysed the scores of competitive men’s matches played since 1946 in this way, excluding those at neutral venues (which means most big tournament games). Using this open source data set (which has also been used by academic researchers), we calculated the average home and away goal difference for each team, then compared them. And this is what we found.

Mexico (looking only at home games at the Azteca) is one of the countries that stands out here. Yes, they tend to win away from home as well, with an average positive score, but when they play in Mexico City they usually win far more heavily, by a margin of more than two extra goals.

That’s really unusual. Indeed it’s the third largest home advantage in the world, in a list of 138 FIFA-registered countries (after excluding teams who have played less than 100 matches in the last 80 years).

Strikingly, the countries in first and second place are Bolivia and Ethiopia—two weaker teams who also happen to play almost all their home games at extremely high altitude, in La Paz and Addis Ababa. While we can’t call this scientific proof of anything, and of course there are lots of other ways of doing the analysis, that’s a pretty clear signal that altitude might well confer a strong home advantage.

What about England?

But there will be two teams on the pitch at the Azteca on Monday morning (or Sunday evening if you’re lucky enough to be there in person). And the other one is England—who are arguably the strongest away team in world football.

We have to say “arguably” for at least two reasons. While our analysis shows England’s average away result is extremely good, this doesn’t necessarily provide a fair comparison with all the other teams, for the reasons we mentioned earlier. For example, Brazil and Argentina in particular may have fewer opportunities to run up big scores against tiny nations like San Marino and Liechtenstein, who England face in Europe. That said, most of the other strongest nations are also in Europe, where they play similar opponents.

Another arguable point here is Germany, whose average away result since 1946 is one hundredth of a goal better than England’s. On that basis, you might say that Germany would be a more worrying visitor for Mexico—except for the fact that Germany’s slender advantage here owes a lot to older matches.

If we rerun the same analysis only on results since the year 2000, England’s away average is much stronger, putting them top of the table by a wide margin. (In any case, Germany have already been eliminated from this year’s tournament.)

So, largely because of their strong away record, England have one of the smallest home advantages in the world—and the smallest of any major team (if we define “major teams” as all former World Cup semi-finalists).

You could reasonably say that none of this amounts to very much. It’s just one way of looking at the numbers. And the way we’ve chosen comes with lots of caveats. We’ve not explicitly accounted for opponent strength in our analysis, for example, and we’ve had to use some judgement over which matches count as “friendly”.

And in any case, away records, which depend on the mentality and skill of individuals who change over time, seem like a much flimsier concept than altitude, which doesn’t.

But look at it this way: if anyone is going to beat Mexico in the World Cup at the Azteca, it’s going to be a strong team, of course. But you might also look for a strong team whose strength depends as little as possible on playing at home. And, according to our analysis, that’s England.