Superstition is rife on a Premier League matchday and, for the home team’s captain, ensuring he and his colleagues attack a favoured end of the ground in the second half remains one of football’s most respected unwritten rules.
Psychologically, it matters. The logic is that playing into the noise from the biggest, loudest mass of their supporters can help pull a team through as legs begin to tire towards the end of a game. Statistically, there are more goals in second halves too, so it also acts as a form of reward for the most loyal fans.
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Legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said that Anfield’s Kop could “suck the ball into the back of the net”, a sentiment that has seen nearly 83 per cent of the club’s Premier League home games over the past nine seasons follow the same shooting pattern, the goal in front of their famous stand reserved for the second-half finale. It was notable that on a night where they dominated coin tosses, Paris Saint-Germain chose to make Liverpool attack the Kop (play left-to-right for television viewers) in the first half of Tuesday’s Champions League last-16 second leg, before choosing to have the tie’s decisive penalty shootout at the other end of the pitch in front of the away fans.
Rational or not, there’s always a mixture of unease and annoyance among the home support when an unplanned change of ends takes place, with some away managers looking to tap into its disruptive power more than most.
Across 39 games in charge of Everton on the road over the past three seasons, Sean Dyche turned the opposition around 24 times, jokingly praising his captain James Tarkowski’s good fortune with so many pre-match coin tosses going his way.
“There are always little details that might help you. You never know, do you?” Dyche said, days after repeating the trick in a 2-0 away win against his previous employers Burnley in December 2023. “I might go to the casino with him (Tarkowski).”
Sean Dyche: the doyen of the switcher-rounders (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
On Monday, however, The Athletic reported that Manchester United head coach Ruben Amorim is looking to flip the notion on its head, electing to turn his own team around whenever they have the chance.
Amorim is said to believe that shooting towards the Stretford End at Old Trafford in the first half (that’s right-to-left for those watching the games on TV) could help to improve their slow starts, with captain Bruno Fernandes winning the toss and asking for the teams to swap ends in each of their past three home games. Since the start of the 2023-24 Premier League season, only Bournemouth have scored fewer than United’s 18 first-half goals in front of their own fans.
Instinctively, it feels wrong. But with seven home league defeats already in 2024-25 — more than United have ever suffered in a single Premier League season before — could it be worth a try?
Has Ruben Amorim unlocked a subtle advantage for his side? (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
Despite the destabilising effect changing ends can have on home-fan psyche, The Athletic’s investigation into its impact on home-team performance last season proved largely inconclusive.
Some sides generally seem unfazed by the ploy, with Liverpool yet to be beaten in the Premier League across the 29 times they have been turned around since 2016-17. Over that same period, Chelsea (beaten by Brentford and Nottingham Forest last season) and Manchester City (conceding two late goals to neighbours United back in December) have been susceptible to shakier days after being turned around.
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In United’s case, meanwhile, there is an intriguing correlation emerging between end changes and results; and not in the way that conventional wisdom would suggest.
Across the past nine seasons, Old Trafford has seen 30 Premier League games with an end change. The home side have won 21 of those, while maintaining a healthy average of 2.1 goals scored per match.
(Michael Regan/Getty Images)
The sample size is much bigger when United attack the Stretford End in the second half, but the table below does suggest they have tended to score less, concede more and pick up fewer points when they attack their favoured goal after the break.
More recently, United are seven games unbeaten when playing towards the Stretford End in the first half, while they have lost five of their last eight shooting towards the East Stand in that period.
Whether the kick-off direction had a bearing or not, Fernandes’ free-kick goal against Arsenal last weekend, in front of the Stretford End, helped United to go in at half-time with a lead at home for the first time in over three months. Against Ipswich a fortnight earlier — also an end-change game — they scored as many first-half goals (two) as they’d managed in their previous 19 matches combined.
Though it’s based on something intangible, rooted in psychology rather than tactics, it appears Amorim is onto something: United do seem to benefit from attacking the Stretford End in the opening 45 minutes of a game.
And if that can help to improve their first-half form, at a stadium where United are unbeaten in 321 Premier League matches where they have been leading at the interval, it might be worth persisting with after all.
(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
