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I'm looking for the name of the concept if there is one. What do you call a team's home-ness or away-ness? If that's not clear, below are a couple example scenarios to illustrate what I'm after.

Imagine you're creating a table to display data about the performance of sports teams. Now imagine that one of the table's columns indicates whether the team was the home team or away team. What would you put as the header of that column?

Alternatively, imagine you're a computer programmer building a sports simulation video game. For a given game, each team has an attribute indicating whether it was the home team or away team. What is the name of that attribute?

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I'm not aware of an official terminology, but watching games or reading sports blogs you often hear/read "at home" or "away" trends, performance, or records. So that's certainly a thing being tracked.

Similar to BowlOfRed's answer, as a programmer, I'd use columns in the DB to figure this out, but I'd set it up differently. I'd create a Matches table to keep track of match results, and there have a venue_id pointing to an id of entries in the Venues table which contains all the venues. To figure out the home/away stats you can just join necessary tables with the venues table to figure out the data for a team's assigned home venue or not. Using ids like that is standard, and I'd also only save the id of involved teams in the Matches table as well which points to the entries in Teams table.

Also keep in mind:

  • matches can be played at neutral sites, so you might want to figure that out too when writing queries using the venue ids of the teams.
  • the teams involved might both use the venues as their home field. So while on paper there are home and away teams, in practice, both teams are playing at home.
  • a team might have multiple home fields over time and also at any time (ex national teams can play in any city within the country).
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    Your advice on the table schema is appreciated. Fortunately, it agrees with what I was already doing. And your points at the bottom are all relevant and astute. Thanks for the input.
    – ibonyun
    Commented Jul 22 at 4:05
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I'm not aware of a specific generic term for this.

If I were storing the data in a table, I'd probably call the column home? or is_home or similar to store a boolean.

Or if that's not available, I might call the column home/away if I were storing the enumeration of home or away. "Site" and "location" also come to mind, but I'd prefer to use that for the actual field/stadium name if available.

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  • Storing a boolean as is_home is a good idea. That hadn't occurred to me. I was treating it as an enum and indeed called it HomeAway, and will likely end up displaying it in the table as "home/away". Thanks for the input. I was hoping for a better term but I guess I should be reassured that there isn't one.
    – ibonyun
    Commented Jul 22 at 4:00

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