In relation to sports, for example a football (soccer) match, a team can either play home or away. For a database design I am looking for a single word to denote this "property", where a team plays, but am struggling to find such a word. Does anyone here have a suggestion?
3 Answers
You could use side; both home side and away side (with or without hyphen) are common designations:
home-side
Noun
(plural home sides)
- (sports) the team that plays at home (in their own stadium)
Antonyms
- away side
(source: YourDictionary.com)
Even if the teams play on neutral ground (for instance during the World Cup), one of the teams is usually the 'virtual' home team and mentioned first in the schedule.
answered Jun 19, 2019 at 9:55
"Host" with values true or false would work nicely in your case. And since you are building a database, then a bit field is the best, since it takes the least amount of disk space. Also if that field is supposed to tell you at whose stadium the game took place at, so it means which team hosted the game. Hence host is the simplest and easiest to understand name of the field in your database.
UPDATE: Another choice is to make this field called "Location" and input as arguments the name of the team that owns the stadium, or the name of the stadium.
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3Trouble with this is, the requirements stated are probably wrong - on occasion, for various reasons, a match will be played at a venue not 'owned' by either side, so the 'location' (my first thought of a proper name) should be a key to another table.– MikeBJun 19, 2019 at 10:38
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1Now that you mention it, there are two possibilities. If this field is in a table about a team in a game, then host works good, since both teams can have false in it, and that would mean neither of the team were hosts, and the match was played elsewhere. If however this field is to be in a table about matches, then it should be location, with the name of the stadium as the argument.– TK-421Jun 19, 2019 at 10:40
In American English, "site" would be the best choice. I say this because there are actually three choices: "home", "away", and "neutral site". "Site" is the standard noun for "neutral" to modify in this context.
"Site" is a conveniently short name. For purposes of database results, "neutral site" can be abbreviated to "neutral" or "neither". For purposes of database storage, "home", "away", and "neutral" can be abbreviated to arbitrary letters or numbers. For example, "H", "A", and "N". You might want to have a fourth value (or null) to indicate that the site is unknown.
Some stadiums host multiple teams in the same sport. For example, the NFL's New York Giants and New York Jets play at the same stadium in New Jersey. They play a game against each other in roughly one out of four years.
Some leagues pretend that every game has both a home team and an away team, even if the game is physically at a neutral site. Which team is the theoretical home team can affect the colors of jerseys that the players wear, which team's season ticket holders get priority to attend the game, who is responsible for hosting the game if the neutral site cannot, and how many of the team's other games can be actual home games. In baseball games, some of the rules depend on which team is the home team.
Thus, you might want to avoid having a single field for "site". You could instead have a "Home" or "IsHome" (or "Away" or "IsAway") boolean field, which indicates which team is the theoretical home (or away) team, and have another "Neutral" or "NeutralSite" boolean field that indicates whether the site is actually at a place that both teams are similarly (un-)familiar with.
