Archive for the ‘Soccer’ Category

Visualizing Soccer League Standings

I feel ashamed for this boring title, but hope that the entry can make up for it. This visualization did inspire me, as a comment did point to my Tour de France visualizations. As with all visualizations, we need data first – this sounds trivial, but is sometimes a frustrating show-stopper. After I found the [...]

Soccer: Can Money buy a Good Team?

The German Bundesliga has its (very short) winter break after 17, i.e., half the games played. We all know – or at least would not disagree immediately – that good players will cost a team a fortune, and the more a team can invest, the better will be the result. Using the (potential) value of [...]

World Cup Aftermath

Now that the world cup is over, and we finally have a winner, it is time to compare the expected values with the real outcome – don’t mix this up with comparing the outcome we would have liked to see with the real outcome, which is often done in business analytics … The expected values [...]

Why Germany wins the 2010 World Cup

There are certainly many models, which try to “calculate” which team will win the 2010 soccer world cup. Looking at the teams that already dropped out, the range of models which were obviously not predicting correctly gets quite big. Here is a visualization of my favorite: For those of you, who more believe in numbers [...]

Soccer Strategy Visualization

It did start with only three players and the keeper on the board, which I used to explain my kids (first graders and below) what offside means, and their creativity expanded it to what looks like Joachim Löw’s strategy for the Ghana match next Wednesday: Let’s proceed with fingers crossed! (The strategy on the board [...]

Soccer Visualization for the World Cup

Special times fuel the development in specific areas. E.g., during WWII a lot of (sometimes curios) inventions and technical optimizations came up – usually not supporting humanity. The Soccer World Cup seems to spur the development of soccer visualizations and sports visualizations in general. My favorite (and apparently not only mine) one is this overview: Querying [...]