Abstract

This study explores how travel stress affects match outcomes in Europe’s top international club competitions—the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League. We examine whether longer journeys weaken away teams, thus strengthening home advantage. By grouping matches by travel distance and analyzing net home advantage (home win % minus away win %), we reveal patterns across competitions and regions. The findings challenge the notion that longer travel consistently favors home teams, highlighting factors like the surprising resilience of away sides in long-distance group stage matches and the diminishing home edge as travel demands level out across tournament tiers.

Introduction

Home advantage is a well-established concept in football, often attributed to factors like familiar surroundings, supportive crowds, and minimal travel fatigue. However, in international club competitions—where distances are longer, travel logistics more demanding, and the stakes significantly higher—this advantage may not follow traditional patterns.

This study investigates the impact of travel distance on team performance, known as travel stress. These tournaments span the breadth of Europe, with teams frequently covering thousands of kilometers across diverse climates, time zones, and infrastructures. By grouping matches into distance-based intervals, we analyze shifts in home and away win percentages. Our goal is to determine whether travel imposes a measurable burden on away teams and how this affects competitive balance on the continental stage.

Data & Methodology

We investigate the relationship between travel stress, and match outcomes in the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League during the 2024–2025 season. Match data was retrieved using the soccerdata Python package, which aggregates statistics from fbref.com, including results, goals scored and kickoff times. To compute travel distances, stadium coordinates were collected manually from Wikipedia and Transfermarkt. The great-circle distance between home and away stadiums was calculated in kilometers using the Haversine formula. 

Stress levels were defined relative to the mean and standard deviation of travel distances within each competition: travel below one standard deviation from the mean was labeled as “No Stress”, travel within one standard deviation as “Mild Stress,” travel exceeding one but within two standard deviations as “High Stress,” and travel beyond two standard deviations as “Stress.” This relative classification allows stress to be assessed in the context of each tournament’s geographic distribution. The analysis combines descriptive statistics, data visualization, and inferential testing to explore scoring performance and away win rates by stress level and determine whether differences in goals scored were statistically significant across stress categories.

Results

Travel Distance Distribution

Travel demands in international club competitions vary significantly across UEFA tournaments, and these differences carry important implications for competitive balance. As shown in Figure 1, median away travel distances are not uniform: while matches in the UEFA Champions League tend to involve shorter journeys, clubs in the Europa League and Conference League frequently face much longer travel requirements.

This disparity is driven in part by the structure of the tournaments. The Champions League includes many top-tier clubs from Western and Central Europe, regions with relatively dense football infrastructures and well-connected travel networks. In contrast, the Europa and Conference Leagues often feature a broader geographic spread, including clubs from Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Caucasus, increasing the average travel distance.

To highlight these structural variations, Figure 1 visualizes the distribution of away travel distances for each competition using a Statathlon-inspired visual identity. The data reveals:

• Champions League matches typically involve shorter travel distances, with a tighter distribution and fewer extreme outliers.
  
• Conference League fixtures exhibit the widest spread, including numerous long-distance outliers beyond 4000 km.
  
• Europa League travel demands are also high, with a broader interquartile range than the Champions League.
  

These differences help establish a deeper understanding of the physical demands placed on clubs at various competition levels, setting the stage for analyzing whether long-distance travel alters competitive dynamics or intensifies home advantage on the continental stage.

Outcome Trends by Travel Distance

Figures 2 through 4 display outcome distributions of home win %, draw %, and away win %—as a function of travel distance for the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League. Each figure highlights how travel shapes the match dynamics differently across tiers of European competition.

In the Champions League, home win rates remain relatively strong up to around 1500 km, peaking in the 500 to 1000 km range. Beyond this point, a steady decline in home win percentage is observed. At the furthest distance bin (2500 to 3000 km), away teams win every match, indicating that travel stress is less significant amongst elite teams traveling far often to lower-tier opposition. Draws remain consistently low across all travel ranges, reflecting the tournament’s decisive match outcomes.

The Conference League reveals a more erratic and volatile pattern. Home win rates oscillate but increase notably beyond 3000 km before collapsing again. Draw percentages fluctuate unpredictably, and away win percentages show no consistent trend. This variability reflects the league’s wide geographical spread and diverse competition levels, where logistical challenges and uneven team quality may drive unpredictable outcomes. Matches beyond 5000 km are rare and show extreme values likely due to small sample sizes.

The Europa League presents the most balanced trend across travel distances. Home win percentages remain robust, consistently above 40 percent even beyond 3000 km. Draws peak between 1000 and 2500 km, suggesting mid-distance fixtures are more evenly matched. Away win rates rise only slightly at the longest distances. This indicates that travel may reduce away team dominance but not significantly enough to reverse outcomes. The structure and team quality in this competition appear to moderate travel-related disadvantages more effectively.

Travel Stress Impact on Away Team Scoring Performance

While the Champions League showed no clear correlation between travel distance and match outcomes, the Europa League and Conference League offered a more fertile ground for such analysis. These competitions involve greater geographic spread, more travel extremes, and more diverse team profiles—factors that can intensify the impact of travel-related stress.

To better capture these effects, we created a custom travel stress metric. Instead of fixed thresholds, we defined stress levels relative to each competition’s mean and standard deviation of travel distances. Trips more than one standard deviation below the mean were labeled “No Stress,” within one standard deviation as “Mild Stress,” between one and two standard deviations above as “High Stress,” and beyond two as “Stress.” This approach adjusts dynamically to the structure of each league, allowing for a more precise assessment of how travel burdens affect performance. 

This method dynamically adjusts for what constitutes short, moderate, or extreme travel in each league. In the Europa League, for example, the mean travel distance was 1656.37 km with a standard deviation of 908.90 km, resulting in the following thresholds: trips under approximately 747 km were labeled as No Stress, between 747 km and 2565 km as Mild Stress, between 2565 km and 3474 km as High Stress, and anything above 3474 km as Stress . 

The Conference League featured even greater travel variation, with a mean of 1664.33 km and a standard deviation of 1142.13 km; here, trips under 522 km were considered No Stress, between 522 km and 2806 km as Mild Stress, between 2806 km and 3948 km as High Stress, and anything beyond 3948 km as Stress . By calibrating stress categories in this way, we better capture the true physical and logistical demands placed on teams, enabling a more accurate analysis of how travel affects team performance across competitions.

The Europa League (Figure 5) reveals a less extreme but still noticeable trend. All four travel stress levels exhibit similar central tendencies (medians around one goal), but distribution width and density differ. In particular, the Stress and High Stress categories show tighter clusters with fewer high-scoring outliers. This indicates that while Europa League teams may maintain baseline competitiveness, their ceiling drops at higher levels. The broader dispersion in the No Stress and Mild Stress groups suggests that shorter travel enables more variability, including higher-scoring outcomes.

The effect was sharper in the Conference League (Figure 6). As travel stress increased, away teams’ offensive output declined markedly. Under No Stress, teams showed healthy goal distributions; but in the High Stress group, output collapsed, with a narrow band centered near zero and almost no outliers. This supports the idea that extreme travel significantly hampers away teams’ attacking potential.

Travel Stress and Away Win Percentage

Morover, we analyzed away win percentages across the four stress categories. Figures 7 and 8 show these distributions for the Europa League and Conference League, respectively.

In the Europa League, results defy expectations. The highest away win percentage (63%) occurs under Stress—the most extreme travel category—while No Stress and High Stress groups sit around 35%, and Mild Stress dips to just 19%. This surprising inversion suggests that long-distance travel does not always hinder performance. One explanation may be that stronger teams are more likely to travel farther, especially in later rounds, yet maintain their quality. Alternatively, weaker home teams in remote locations may allow visiting sides to thrive.

The Conference League, by contrast, shows a clearer pattern. Away win rates peak under Mild Stress—above 35%—but drop sharply as stress increases. Under High Stress or Stress, away teams win fewer than 15% of matches. This aligns with earlier offensive metrics, reinforcing that travel extremes impair performance. The relative success at Mild Stress may reflect neutral conditions or matches against weaker hosts, where moderate travel is not yet a disadvantage.

While the Conference League results align with expectations greater stress reduces away win probability, the Europa League introduces nuance, possibly driven by tournament structure, team quality variance, or even fixture randomness. These findings highlight the need to contextualize stress effects not only by distance but also by match stage, team ranking, and travel directionality.

Together, these two plots reveal that stress is not a binary factor, but a shifting influence modulated by the nature of the league, the quality of participants, and scheduling design.

Statistical Validation of Travel Stress Effects

To assess whether the observed variations in goal-scoring outcomes across stress levels are statistically significant, we performed one-way ANOVA tests on both home and away goals for each competition.

The results, summarized in Table 1, reveal that stress significantly affects away team performance only in the Conference League.

The Conference League is the only tournament where stress level has a statistically significant effect on away goals scored (p = 0.006). This supports earlier findings from the violin and bar plots, which suggested that extreme travel stress correlates with reduced away performance. Conversely, the effect on home goals in the Conference League was minimal and not significant (p = 0.832), reinforcing that travel burdens fall primarily on visiting teams.

In contrast, both the Champions League and Europa League do not show statistically significant differences in goal outcomes across stress levels, for either home or away sides. This may reflect greater squad depth, more balanced fixture planning, or differences in competition formats. In the Champions League specifically, the lack of statistical significance aligns with previous plots, where away win percentages did not show a coherent trend with respect to distance.

Conclusion

While visual trends in win rates and goal distributions suggest travel stress plays a role in international club competitions, statistical testing confirms that this effect is significant only for away teams in the Conference League. This highlights that lower-tier competitions with wider geographical dispersion and smaller budgets may be more vulnerable to the performance cost of long-distance travel. In contrast, teams in elite tournaments appear more resilient to stress, likely due to better travel logistics and depth in player rotation.

These insights not only inform competitive analysis but also suggest potential improvements in scheduling policy, such as clustering match locations or adjusting rest intervals to reduce stress-driven disadvantages.

Data sources : www.fbref.com, www.transfersmarkt.com, www.wikipedia.com