CANBERRA: Wearing red maybe be enough to give sports teams a distinct advantage, according to a new analysis of British soccer success.
Using data from the last 55 years, researchers at Plymouth and Durham universities in England found that teams with red kits were significantly more successful. The results are detailed in the Journal of Sports Sciences.
Previous research has shown that red uniforms confer an advantage to Olympic combatants in wresting, taekwondo and boxing, but not for team sports.
Red, white and blue
Lead researcher Martin Attrill of Plymouth University and his team compared the top 68 teams in the English soccer league from 1947 until 2002. They measured each team's success in home games, when a team typically wears their signature colours.
The study used home league position, number of home wins and average points awarded per home game to decide which teams were more successful. Red teams performed significantly better than those wearing white or blue, whilst teams in yellow-orange uniforms performed the worst.
The researchers then examined success in matches away from home. "We found no difference at all in performance away from home, when teams typically wear a range of colours that often change over the years. This follows what we would expect if wearing red has an effect," said Attrill.
Teams from big cities have access to more resources than those in rural areas, so to control for this potentially confounding effect, the researchers also compared the results from all cities in England where there is a team playing in red and a rival team of another colour, said Attrill. "Over time the red teams have performed significantly better in the league, despite sharing the same potential resource base."
Colour mechanism
"The evidence for an effect of red is fairly convincing, but it is unclear how this effect comes about," commented Peter Dijkstra of the University of Glasgow in Scotland who was not an author of the study. "it is now time for experimental tests to tease apart the exact mechanisms," he said.
Dijkstra's own research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in February, overturned a previous finding that wearing a blue uniform confers an advantage in judo.
Attril's team offer several potential explanations for the advantage of red. In nature, red is often associated with male aggression and dominance, the researchers note, so in soccer, red may intimidate the other team and impair their performance. Red might also subconsciously attract more paying supporters, increasing a club's resource base, they said.
