Category: Football

3D football match visualisations

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I used to do something a bit like these a long time ago and have resurrected them as a way of dipping a toe back into football analysis. They violate just about every rule of data visualisation, but they’re fun and I like them. Think of them as a souvenir poster of a match, rather…

Football Wind Maps

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I’ve had this project in mind for quite a while because it merges some weather data visualisation that appeals to my inner paraglider pilot, with football stats. Wind maps like these have become quite common, starting with static images and progressing into genuinely useful tools like windy.com.   I wondered if something similar might be…

Mapping Premier League player’s birthplaces

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As part of my Chalkboard project, I assembled data on a large number of football squads. Sometimes with a project like this you end up with more data than you need and so I found myself with a database of players’ birthplaces. Where were this season’s Premier League players born? They come from all over the…

Mapping the football analytics network

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Twitter has a lively (and occasionally argumentative) football analytics community, encompassing a wide variety of amateur analysts, professionals, coaches, journalists, scouts and pundits. Today’s post is a new version of my visualisation of the community and the connected individuals within it. James Yorke dubbed the first version of this project the “Ego Viz”, which I rather like….

It’s the little differences: Useful football heat maps

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If you’ve been following my recent football posts, you’ll know that I’ve been playing with small multiples visualisations of shot location and chance creation. I want to visualise possession in a similar way, but try to really highlight the differences between teams. We all know that a game of football is mostly played in midfield, but rather…