Peak decibels measure the goal, not the atmosphere

Stadium noise is sold as a single loudest number, which rewards the moment a crowd has no choice but to react.

Every few months a club announces that its supporters have hit some enormous decibel figure and a graphic goes round confirming it. The number is real. It is also close to meaningless as a measure of whether a ground is a difficult place to play.

A peak reading captures one instant, and that instant is almost always a goal. Every crowd on earth screams at a goal. A quiet, half-empty stadium watching a winner go in at the death will produce a spike that flatters it enormously, while a ground that hums with genuine hostility for ninety minutes and happens to watch a goalless draw will register as tame. You have measured the event, not the environment.

If you want the number that actually affects players, measure sustained noise during the opposition's build-up phase. That is the sound that does something. A defender receiving under pressure with his back to play depends on a shout from his goalkeeper, and the reason away teams look scrambled in certain grounds is not that they are frightened, it is that the audio channel they rely on has been jammed. Communication is the mechanism. Volume is only its proxy.

Which leads to a slightly unpopular conclusion. Continuous mid-level noise is worth more to a home side than intermittent loud noise, and modern crowd behaviour has drifted the wrong way. Grounds where singing is organised in blocks with long gaps between, or where the loudest moment of the half is a piece of stadium audio played over the speakers, are producing spikes and silence. The spikes will be reported. The silence is when the opposition centre backs get their instructions across.

There is a related point about broadcast. Television mixes crowd sound to be pleasant, compressing peaks and lifting the floor, which means the version most people experience has had the very variation that matters flattened out. If a ground sounds relentless on your television it may simply have a good mix.

I am not against the noise records. They are fun and clubs are entitled to their fun. But when somebody uses one as evidence in an argument about home advantage, they are quoting the loudest second of a match in which their team scored.

Play me the ninety minutes. I will tell you whether it is a hard place to go.