There are a few visualizations of the World Cup knocking around.
- Clearly and Simply writes about using Tableau to visualize historical data.
- Andy Kirk has a pretty good list of a variety of approaches to both historical and match data.
As football, compared with many other games popular in the US, is often a low scoring affair, I'm interested in those visualizations that can help me understand if the result was due to consistent skill, or if it was rather a matter of luck (and poor refereeing ;-) With this in mind, I quite like the New York Times approach. The summary statistics can help get at the differences between the teams.
However, ultimately, this is not much more than a table of data points. I don't see anything in the timing that helps me understand anything other than Italy's desperation towards the end of the match.
I suspect that their hear map view of the location of play might be of interest if it could be anything more than the brief time slices that it currently provides.
Lots more historical data-analysis here, though it won't really do anything to answer your question about skill-vs-luck in individual matches.
https://pub.needlebase.com/actions/visualizer/V2Visualizer.do?domain=World-Cup-History
Posted by: Glenn Mcdonald | June 25, 2010 at 09:37 AM
I believe if the world cup was played 12 times that we would probably end up with at least 10 different winners. There is an element of skill that comes into the data/statistics but as you indicate also an element of luck.
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Posted by: footballgifts | July 19, 2010 at 03:31 PM