Four Premier League matches into life at Hill Dickinson Stadium, Everton appeared to have found their new fortress remarkably quickly.
They had beaten Brighton and Crystal Palace, drawn with Aston Villa and West Ham, and taken eight points from their first four home matches. Contemporary Premier League analysis was already describing how quickly the new ground had begun to feel like home. StatMuse Premier League
Then the results changed.
Across their remaining 15 home fixtures, Everton won four, drew three and lost eight. Their final Hill Dickinson record was six wins, five draws and eight defeats. StatMuse
By May, Everton had collected only 23 Premier League points at home.
They collected 26 away. StatMuse FBref
For a club leaving Goodison Park after more than a century, that seems like a simple story.
Everton moved stadiums and lost their home advantage.
Except the underlying football says almost the opposite.
Everton generated substantially better performances at Hill Dickinson than they did away from home. Their home expected-goal difference was effectively level at -0.03. Away from home, it was -9.43. They also had more possession, took more shots, put more efforts on target and generated more expected goals at home. StatMuse
The first season at Hill Dickinson therefore poses a more interesting question than whether Everton found another Goodison.
What do we actually mean by home advantage?
On results, Hill Dickinson was no Goodison
The historic comparison is initially brutal.
Everton played 633 Premier League home matches at Goodison, winning 286, drawing 170 and losing 177. Across that entire period, they averaged 1.62 points per match. Premier League
Their first Hill Dickinson season produced only 1.21 home points per match. StatMuse
If those are the only two numbers we use, the conclusion writes itself.
Goodison: 1.62.
Hill Dickinson: 1.21.
Home advantage down.
But that comparison quietly treats more than three decades of Everton teams as though they were one stable baseline.
They were not.
The historic Goodison average contains strong Everton sides, weak ones and everything in between. It tells us what Everton averaged across the entire Premier League era at the ground. It does not tell us what the 2025/26 team should have been expected to achieve there.
Recent seasons provide a very different picture.
Everton took 29 home points in 2021/22, 21 in 2022/23, 28 in 2023/24 and 24 in Goodison’s final Premier League season in 2024/25. Hill Dickinson’s first season produced 23. StatMuse
Go further back and the volatility becomes even clearer. Everton’s home return ranged from 21 points in 2022/23 to 43 in 2016/17 across the seasons included in Figure 1. Their 1.21 points per match at Hill Dickinson was actually identical to their 2015/16 home return at Goodison. StatMuse
Figure 1 — Everton’s first Hill Dickinson season was weak historically — but familiar recently.
Hill Dickinson’s first season was poor compared with the full historical Goodison average.
Compared with Goodison’s final season, Everton lost one home point.
Those are both true statements.
They tell very different stories.
The stranger result was that Everton did better away
Everton finished 13th with 49 points. Their home record was 6-5-8; their away record was 7-5-7. FBref
That meant 23 home points and 26 away.
On results alone, Everton were three points better away from Hill Dickinson than inside it. StatMuse
But this is where the season stops behaving intuitively.
Everton did not play like a team whose away environment suited them better.
At Hill Dickinson they took 232 shots. Away from home they took 190.
They put 82 shots on target at home and 60 away.
Their average possession was 46.3% at home and 41.0% away.
They generated 25.68 xG at home against 21.77 away. StatMuse
Most importantly, Everton’s defensive chance numbers also moved sharply in the other direction.
They allowed 25.71 xGA at home but 31.20 away. StatMuse
Combine attacking and defensive expected goals and the contrast becomes much clearer.
Everton’s home xG difference was -0.03 — effectively level across the season.
Their away xG difference was -9.43.
So while Everton earned three more actual points away, their expected-goal balance was 9.40 goals better at home. StatMuse
Figure 2 — Everton got better home performances — but more away points.
That is the central paradox.
The results say Everton were more successful away.
The underlying performances say they were considerably stronger at home.
Home advantage is not one thing
Football usually measures home advantage with results.
This was outlined in FIVDA’s previous analysis of Premier League home-versus-away performances. That makes sense. League tables are decided by points, not expected goals.
But Everton’s first Hill Dickinson season demonstrates why results alone can hide something important.
A team can have a results advantage and a performance advantage, and the two do not always point in the same direction.
Everton’s results advantage in 2025/26 was actually away from home: 1.37 points per match away against 1.21 at home. StatMuse
Their performance advantage went strongly the other way.
At home Everton had more of the ball, attempted 42 more shots, put 22 more on target and produced a much stronger expected-goal difference. StatMuse
Expected goals do not tell us what Everton “deserved”.
They tell us something narrower: the balance and quality of chances generated and conceded looked substantially healthier at Hill Dickinson than away.
That distinction changes the stadium story and how difficult Premier League stadiums are for visiting teams.
Everton’s first season does not provide strong evidence that the move erased their ability to perform better at home.
If anything, their location-based performance split became larger.
The final Goodison season makes the paradox stronger
The cleanest comparison is not Hill Dickinson against 33 seasons of Goodison history.
It is Hill Dickinson against the Goodison team immediately before it.
In 2024/25, Everton generated 23.22 xG and 23.54 xGA at Goodison, giving them a home xG difference of -0.32.
Away from home they generated 18.36 xG and 24.47 xGA, an away xG difference of -6.11. StatMuse
That meant Everton’s home xG difference was 5.79 goals better than their away figure, or approximately 0.30 goals per match. StatMuse
In the first Hill Dickinson season, that gap increased to 9.40 goals, approximately 0.49 per match. StatMuse
This does not mean Hill Dickinson made Everton better.
David Moyes, the squad, opponents and season all changed alongside the stadium. There is no controlled experiment here.
But it does challenge the simplest version of the relocation narrative.
If leaving Goodison had clearly stripped Everton of their home advantage, we might expect their home performances to become less distinct from their away ones.
By expected-goal difference, the opposite happened.
Did Moyes’s football simply work better away?
The results make that explanation tempting.
Everton won seven away matches and six at home. They collected 26 away points against 23 at Hill Dickinson. StatMuse
But the chance data do not support the idea that Everton’s football was simply more effective away.
Their away xG difference was nearly nine and a half goals below zero.
At home, it was almost exactly level. StatMuse
The safer interpretation is that Everton’s away results were better, not that their away performances were.
One plausible explanation is that Hill Dickinson encouraged — or allowed — Everton to play more assertively, while visiting teams approached them differently. That could help explain the higher possession, greater shot volume and better chance balance at home.
But the evidence supplied here cannot establish that.
Opponent block height has not been systematically coded, atmosphere has not been quantified, and possession itself does not tell us why Everton played differently.
The territorial pattern is measurable.
Its cause is not.
The early “fortress” story also needs caution
There was another tempting narrative during the season.
Everton began with two wins and two draws at Hill Dickinson and were unbeaten through their opening four home league fixtures. StatMuse Premier League
They took eight points from those matches.
They took only 15 from the remaining 15. StatMuse
It would be easy to describe that as a “new-stadium bounce” fading.
We cannot show that.
The split is real. The cause is not observable from the public data.
Changes in opponent quality, injuries, form, finishing and game state can all move results over a 15-match period.
The most we can say is that the early results-based optimism did not survive the full season.
That matters because four matches produced one story.
Nineteen produced another.
Other Premier League moves did not follow one script
Everton are not the first Premier League club to discover that leaving a familiar stadium produces an irresistible narrative.
The historical outcomes are mixed.
Arsenal earned 45 home points in their final Highbury season and 42 in their first at the Emirates.
Manchester City fell from 29 at Maine Road to 24 in their first season at the City of Manchester Stadium.
Southampton dropped from 35 at The Dell to 26 at St Mary’s.
Derby moved the other way, improving from 30 home points at the Baseball Ground to 39 at Pride Park. Sky Sports
Everton went from 24 home points in Goodison’s final season to 23 at Hill Dickinson. StatMuse FBref
Figure 3 — Premier League stadium moves have not produced one consistent result.
A one-point decline looks rather less dramatic in that context.
West Ham and Southampton are further examples of clubs whose first-season home points fell after relocation, but those cases should not be turned into a universal law. BBC Sport
The historical record contains decline, improvement and relatively small change.
The larger evidence says there is no universal stadium curse
Research across a much larger sample makes that caution even stronger.
One peer-reviewed study examined 98 professional teams from 25 UEFA-affiliated leagues, comparing three seasons before relocation with three afterwards while accounting for team ability. It found no consistent adjusted change in home advantage following stadium moves. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
A separate long-run study of English professional football from 1974 to 2018 also tested new-stadium introduction and found no meaningful overall effect on relative home advantage. De Economist
That does not tell us Hill Dickinson had no effect on Everton.
It tells us we should be suspicious of any general rule claiming new stadiums automatically weaken — or strengthen — teams at home.
Venue changes occur alongside squad changes, managerial changes, changing team quality and different opponents.
Stadium relocation is visible.
Causality is much harder.
So did Everton lose their home advantage?
On points, Everton’s first Hill Dickinson season was underwhelming.
They averaged 1.21 points per home match, well below the 1.62 Premier League average across Goodison’s full history, and they collected more points away than at home. Premier League StatMuse
But that is only half the story.
Compared with their away matches, Everton produced more possession, more shots, more shots on target, more xG and substantially better defensive expected-goal numbers at Hill Dickinson. StatMuse
Their underlying home-away xG advantage was actually larger than in Goodison’s final season. StatMuse StatMuse
Nineteen matches are not enough to tell us what Hill Dickinson will become.
They are enough to show why “home advantage” needs a more careful definition.
If we measure it only by points, Everton’s first season looks like a decline.
If we measure how differently they actually performed at home and away, the advantage was still there — and by one important measure, it became stronger.
Hill Dickinson did not give Everton another Goodison in its first year.
But the evidence does not show that Everton simply left their home advantage behind.
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JC
Sources for the data presented are referenced within the article.
The main image is from Unsplash by Zach Rowlandson with the article title overlay.