2026 Strategy Clinic Week 6: Home Field Advantage

By: The Fantasy Physician

Week 6 Big Question – Should I favor players playing at home?

We layer the muscles over the bones.  In our Week 4 and Week 5 articles, we highlighted the general value in the Kickbase scoring system of taking players from winning teams, seasoned with cautions about the impact of the CONCACAF Champions Cup schedule on some of those top players from top teams.

After a week off for the international break, many teams will have time to rest and reset.  I hope you have, too!  Week 6 looks like a week in which the strategy basics should apply.

Major League Soccer is known for having a strong home field advantage both when compared to other American sports and when compared to soccer leagues around the world.  After the first five weeks of the MLS 2026 season, the collective record of teams playing at home is 40 wins (54%), 20 losses (27%), and 14 draws (195), which translates into 1.81 points per game for home teams and 1.00 points per game for away teams.  This runs even higher than the historical homefield advantage in MLS (most recently closer to 1.5 points per game according to American Soccer Analysis), but the short answer to the lead-in question is, yes, you should favor players playing at home.

How does home field advantage benefit players on your Kickbase squad?

Let’s look at a small group of very simple fantasy-relevant statistics as they pertain to this young MLS season (5 weeks in with 74 total matches played) so far:

As you can see, so far in 2026 wins, goals, and clean sheets happen about twice as often at home as on the road.  Possession, however, is similar home and away.  Let’s churn this into Kickbase points:

1. Wins: Kickbase gives you 15 points if your player plays on the winning team AND docks you 15 points if your player plays on the losing team.  That win-loss swing of 30 points is a considerable percentage of total players’ scores.  But that’s not all.  Kickbase gives every player on a team (even the goalkeeper!) 5 points for each team goal scored and docks each player 5 points for each team goal conceded.  Since wins by definition involve one team scoring more goals than the other, players see a net 5 point bonus multiplied by the goal difference in each match, which can be either positive or negative.
2. Goals: It goes without saying that each week we put a squad together, we look for goal scorers.  Goals pay big in Kickbase, and twice as many of them happen at home as on the road in MLS.  But this important statistic is not just about whether to select Sam Surridge ( 7 goals in 291 minutes played) over Cade Cowell ( 0 goals in 320 minutes played).  Goals represent a surrogate for a slew of statistics that pay well in Kickbase: assists, big chances created, shots at goal, shots assists, shots on target, near misses of various types, etc.  I do not present the exact correlation between goals and these other statistics, and our intuitions can be wrong, but the “intuition” that more assists happen wherever more goals happen is not likely to be wrong.
3. Clean Sheets:   Twice as many clean sheets have also happened (if you only remember one number from this article, 2 should be that number: twice as many wins, goals, and clean sheets at home compared with away so far in 2026.  In 2025, after 12 matches, the home advantage on clean sheets was smaller but still very significant (closer to 50% more).  Kickbase, played in a clean sheet result, pays 5 points to a goalkeeper, 3 to a defender, 2 to a midfielder, and 1 to a forward, with an additional payment once beyond the above for players who play the full match.  Doing the math, players who play a full match and whose side shut out their opponents earn as follows: 50 points for a goalkeeper, 30 points for a defender, 20 points for a midfielder, and 10 points for a forward.

   As we discussed before Week 2, there is more than one way to do well with goalkeepers, but clean sheets are most certainly one of them.  Currently the top 4 goalkeepers (Daniel, Andrew Thomas, Yohei Takaoka, and Hugo Lloris) have collectively earned 16 out of 20 possible clean sheets.

4. Possession: Footy Stats reports 51% possession at home vs 49% possession on the road.  So unlike the above stats, this does not correlate with homeness or awayness, at least not very much.  A subset of Kickbase statistics likely do correlate with possession eg passing statistics and accrual of these may help certain players do well (or at least have a solid floor) whether home or away.  We may explore that in a future article.

Case illustration of home field advantage as it impacts Kickbase player scores:  I play in a fantasy draft league that uses the Kickbase scoring system and have a roster that includes defensive midfielder Andres Cubas of Vancouver and attacking midfielder Joaquin Pereyra of Minnesota.  In Week 4, Vancouver hosted Minnesota, and I could only pick one of these players. I chose Pereyra because I was hoping he might contribute to a goal.  Vancouver won this match 6-0.  Neither player had a goal contribution.  Cubas scored a 157, and Pereyra earned a 99.  Cubas benefited from the win (+15 points), the net goal difference (+30 points), and the clean sheet (+20 points) while Pereyra lost 15 points for the loss and 30 points for the net goal difference.  If one stripped away stats that are sensitive to homeness or awayness (say they played in a theoretical neutral venue with a 1-1 result) but otherwise the two played the exact same game, Cubas would have had a 92 and Pereyra 145.  Acknowledging a lot of hypotheticals in this case, it illustrates how simply picking the home player – in a good matchup – can redound to your fantasy advantage.

The Footy Stats website presents additional aspects of homefield advantage in MLS, including teams that have relatively more of it.

Taking advantage of home field advantage in Week 6

In the best case scenario, which is to say the most favorable matchup, choose top players from top teams playing at home against weak opponents.

Matchups like that in Week 6:  Salt Lake City vs Kansas City, Miami vs. Austin, New York City FC vs. St Louis, LAFC vs Orlando, and Vancouver vs Portland.   Choosing 11 players for those 5 highlighted teams should score well.

But don’t forget the home teams in some more even matchups: Toronto vs Colorado, New England vs Montreal, Atlanta vs. Columbus, Charlotte vs. Philadelphia, and LA Galaxy vs Minnesota.  Two of the Kickbase Rush Challenges require you to limit your players to 1 per team, so this second tier of matches may prove important for managers who need players from more teams.

Finally, in some weeks weak teams host strong ones.  Chicago vs Nashville may still prove attractive to managers who want Nashville’s rampant stars this week. Players whose Kickbase points are less sensitive to home-away factors eg Jeppe Tverskov of San Diego, who benefits from point accrued from San Diego’s high possession style, may still beckon when away from home, at least for having a solid floor.

Who said not to be a Homer?

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The “Fantasy Physician” is Ron Birnbaum, @Half Century City on Discord
The “Fantasy Therapist” is Mike Leister, @Kenobi on Discord
The “Fantasy Meteorologist” is Asher Malaschak, @Storminator on Discord
The “Fantasy Gastroenterologist” is Christian Ward, @xward on Discord