Home Team

When professional teams play in that venue, they are said to be the “home team”; when the team plays elsewhere, they are the away, visiting, or road team. Home teams wear home colors.

Rules and conventions often apply to the choice of home and away colors. In Australian football, the home team traditionally wears black shorts. In American football and ice hockey, the home team tends to wear uniforms that feature their team colors, whereas the visiting team will wear white or a lighter color. On the other hand, in baseball and basketball, the home team will typically choose to wear the lighter colored version of its uniform. Many teams have a home uniform which is mostly white and referred to as the “home whites”.

The road team will generally wear a version of its uniform with one of the darker of its official colors as the main color, or in baseball with a grey main color referred to as the “road greys”. The term “home whites” originated in the early days of Major League Baseball.

Typically the visiting team had no access to laundry facilities and thus the players were unable to clean their uniforms on the road. By wearing grey or another dark color the visiting team was better able to conceal the dirt and grass stains that had accumulated on their uniforms over the course of the series. The home team, having access to laundry facilities, was able to wear clean white uniforms each day, hence the term “home whites”.

In any context where a game score or the pair of teams meeting in a game are mentioned, the team mentioned first (left or top) is the home team, except in the United States and Canada, and to a lesser extent, Japan, where home teams are mentioned second. The North American and Japanese practice of listing the home team second likely derives from baseball, in which the home team bats after the visiting team in each inning. Exceptions are found in most North American soccer competitions, where the international standard of listing the home team first is mostly adhered to.

Typically, the home team has responsibilities such as supplying the venue and equipment, hosting its opponent, media and the officials (referees, umpires, etc.), and may have the opportunity to sell tickets, food and media rights.