In the past two years (and one week), we’ve seen 8 UFC shows take place in Brazil, with this amount steadily increasing — 1 in 2011, 3 in 2012, 7 in 2013 (3 still to come).
Given that a large majority of UFC shows and their fighter population reside outside of Brazil, how “fair” is it to these fighters that so many of their fights take place in Brazil against Brazilian opponents? When we say “fair”, we refer to two things — the “hometown advantage” and the matchmaking.
The “hometown advantage” is something we looked at very briefly a couple of years ago, when some bookmakers like Bwin started to claimed that in sports such as Poker, it can give you what you need to win. We found just under a 2% advantage for the home fighter (a hometown fighter with say… 98 rating points would have a 50/50 chance versus an outsider with 100 rating points). However, this included a slew of contests that involved neighboring entities (example — US vs. Canada) and I think we can all agree a United States vs. Brazil or even more extreme, Japan vs. Brazil at Brazil is a far cry from the aforementioned border wars. Plus, the database is much, much more mature now. A detailed re-visit of this analysis of this is better saved for another day.
Using the fighter “nationality” setting you see on our ranking pages, I isolated 60 fights from the 8 previously mentioned UFC shows that involved a Brazil vs. non-Brazil fighter in Brazil, that resulted in non-draw, non-no contest outcomes. Brazilian fighters won 47 of these fights, a win rate of 78.33%. If we expand this window back to 1/1/2010 and include all organizations where we know the nationalities of both fighters (399 fights), this win rate drops significantly to 62.15% — though is still sizable.
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| So, how much of this is the mysterious “hometown advantage” and how much of this is matchmaking? |
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[#1 W145] 
[#3 W145] 
[#2 SW] 
[#8 HW] 
Robert Neal (2-0-0)