Team A and Team B are two evenly matched teams who hate each other. Team A prevails in the first meeting.
When these two teams meet again, who do you think will have the psychological edge? Team B, because of revenge motivation? Or Team A, because of confidence that it can win again, and a desire to deny its opponent revenge?
That depends.
If my team lost last time, then they have the edge because they’re the plucky underdogs with everything to prove.
If my team won last time, then they have the edge because they’ve won before and they can do it again.
…
Team B. Team A is complacent. They also know team B is out for revenge.
Neither. They’re professional sportsmen. If they were evenly matched before the first game, they’re still evenly matched before the second game.
Experience from many combinations in football (european), where teams play each other in a short time, does give me the impression that the team that did worse in the first match, typically does better the second time around. Difficult to establish whether teams are actually equal, or to take into account home advantage and such.
Recent examples:
Bayern Munch destroying Arsenal after having lost a couple of weeks earlier
Ajax earning a draw at Feyenoord after having lost a couple of weeks earlier (these were both in the Feyenoord ground though). It was because of a bad referee call though, bastards.
It’s not exactly “psychological”, but I can see how the losing team would have a strategic advantage in the rematch. They can probably safely assume that the winners will keep doing what worked the last time, whereas the winners know that the losers will make adjustments, but can’t predict ahead of time what those will be.
I don’t have a cite, but I remember reading that in the NFL, when a team defeats a divisional rival in both regular-season games and then meets them again in the playoffs, the team which lost in the regular season wins some large percentage of the time.
http://www.pro-football-reference.com/blog/?p=458
(written in 2008) “Since the merger, there have been 17 instances of a team trying to beat another team thrice in a season. In 11 of those cases, the team succeeded.”
Of course, any time you face a team three times in a season, it means both teams are playoff quality, so a relatively close margin should be expected.
EDIT: This article in 2014 says the team which won twice won 13-of-20 of the third meetings.
Even getting to the playoffs doesn’t mean the teams are evenly matched. That’s the problem with this hypothetical, ‘all other things being equal’ doesn’t happen much in real life. Usually one team has an advantage aside from the ‘psychology’.
Ignorance fought! Thanks for the correction.