Matchday 19 of Serie A completely wiped out home advantage: no home wins at all—something that had happened only three other times before.
It was supposed to be a “quiet” transitional round for the teams at the top of the table, with eyes already on Sunday’s blockbuster at San Siro between Inter and Napoli and on the rescheduled Matchday 16 fixtures set for Wednesday and Thursday. Instead, it was anything but.
Among the top three, Inter were the only side to take all three points, making the most of the… reversed home-field factor. On a matchday in which home advantage was literally erased across Serie A, the Nerazzurri had the “luck” of playing away from home.
Jokes aside, what happened on Matchday 19 was an event—although it would be more accurate to call it a crazy chain of events—that was truly rare. Across ten matches, there wasn’t a single home win.
Six away victories and four draws is the astonishing tally of a round that unexpectedly enters the history books. In the era of a 20-team Serie A, this has happened only three other times.
Put like that, it still doesn’t fully convey how extraordinary it was, so it’s worth digging a little deeper to grasp the scale of what we witnessed.
Serie A adopted the 20-team format in the 2004/05 season. From then until now, 21 full seasons have been played, plus exactly half of the current one.
Each season consists of 38 matchdays. Multiply that by 21 and you get 798 matchdays already completed. Add the 19 rounds of the current season and the total reaches 817 matchdays.
That’s the number that truly puts this event into perspective: only four times out of 817 has a Serie A round ended without a single home win across ten matches.
We’re talking about a percentage so tiny—not even reaching 0.5%—that it becomes not just marginal, but almost residual.
What makes it even more remarkable is that Matchday 19 included at least two fixtures—Napoli vs Verona and Milan vs Genoa—that looked like absolute “banker” home wins.
And so we come back to the starting point of this editorial: the dramatic shake-up at the top of the table on a matchday where no upheaval was expected. Inter surged to +3 on Milan and +4 on Napoli, on the eve of a head-to-head clash to be played at home that could spectacularly send the Nerazzurri to +7 on the reigning champions coached by Conte—who is still dealing with a squad ravaged by injuries at a crucial moment of the season.
Everything suggests that Chivu’s side have launched the first real surge of the campaign, in search of a decisive breakaway. But this Serie A is far too unpredictable to hazard forecasts or draw early conclusions: anything can still happen.
L’articolo Home advantage… reversed proviene da Soccer Made In Italy.
