The crowd noise that matters comes before the shot, not after the goal

Anyone can be loud when the net bulges; the sound that changes a match is the one that arrives while the outcome is still open.

Every stadium in the world hits the same peak when a goal goes in. That number tells you nothing. It is a reflex, it lasts eleven seconds, and by then the ball is on the centre spot and the moment it might have influenced has already gone.

The interesting sound is earlier and quieter. A winger takes a touch towards the byline and a low swell starts before he has beaten anyone. A midfielder steps onto a loose ball forty yards out and the noise rises to meet a shot he has not decided to take. That is a crowd reading the game one beat ahead of the players, and it does two things. It tells the man on the ball that his teammates' runs are worth making, and it tells the defender that something is about to happen to him.

I would argue this is most of what home advantage actually is now, with the referee part shrinking. Officials are watched by cameras and reviewed by people in a room in another city. The player who hurries a clearance because eight thousand people started shouting at the same moment is not being reviewed by anybody.

Which is why the modern bowl worries me. The seating plans that produce the best sightlines and the best hospitality revenue also spread the loudest people evenly through a stadium, and evenly distributed noise does not swell, it just sits there at a decent average. Anticipation needs a dense block of people who all see the same thing at the same instant and react without deciding to. That is what rail seating quietly restored in Germany and what English clubs spent thirty years engineering out before starting to engineer it back in.

Clubs measure this badly when they measure it at all. A peak reading is a marketing line for a press release. What I would track is the rate of rise during open play, the gradient rather than the summit, and I would compare it by stand.

You would learn something uncomfortable from that. Some sections of your ground are silent right up until the ball crosses the line, and then they are the loudest in the place. Those seats are not helping you.