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Before I jump into the sports data viz this week I wanted to take a moment to pause and acknowledge the tragic news that came out of the States this week. Footballer Anton Walkes passed away, at the age of 25, after a boating accident near Miami on Wednesday.
On a personal note Anton had given me many happy memories through my love of Portsmouth Football Club, not least being part of the 2018-19 Checkatrade trophy winning team. Anton started his career at Tottenham Hotspur but he will no doubt be best known for becoming a shining light of the MLS, representing both Atlanta United and Charlotte.
Sometimes life has a cruel way of reminding us we should all enjoy the good times whilst we can. RIP Anton.
On the data viz front, this week saw many fantastic football related vizzes. Let's start our review with those vizzes that included the SportsVizSunday hashtag in their tweets (I say this as whilst Team SVS do our best to find sports data viz each week, the inclusion of the hashtag in your tweets saves us so much time, so thank you to everyone who does!).
SportsVizSunday legend, Rob Radburn, created this fantastic beeswarm as part of our January challenge collaboration with #GamesNightViz. Rob explored the FIFA23 data for Premier League teams, the resulting viz is exemplary and I am delighted to see the huge amount of love it has received on Twitter.
Next up, another regular SVS contributor, Bo McCready. Bo used Tableau to create these fantastic Austin FC prints. Seeing data viz come to life on actual prints is so inspiring, great job, Bo.
Naresh Suglani explored what is the best foreign starting 11 for Liverpool. There were a few names in the viz that were a real blast from the past, who can forget the Grobbelaar knee wobbles against Roma?!
One of the real joys of the last 2-3 years has been the expansion of the SportsVizSunday community beyond people who use Tableau. I passionately believe there is so much to learn from embracing the different medium used to create data viz and it is always a highlight for me when I read the blog and see a good R viz... speaking of which...
Joe Chelladurai looked at the Premier League rankings of teams for the current season. His use of small multiples is brilliantly done and I love the little touches like removing the axis to simplify and clean the end product.
One last football viz, and this time it focuses on the World Cup. Jaymes Monte used StatsBomb 360 data to analyse different types of forwards at this year's tournament. The result is a fantastic piece of analysis and a really accessible and engaging viz.
Moving away from football, I loved this piece by Doug Stanley in which he celebrated Steven Stamkos' 500th career NHL goal. Gorgeous "rink plot" of where the goals were scored from and a really striking overall design.
I deliberately held this next piece until last, as I wanted to celebrate the personal nature of Aakarsh's tennis odyssey viz. Some of the best viz come from working on data that is personal to the creator and this viz from Aarkash is so incredibly clean and visually appealing, great job (resisting the urge to say aced it!).
That's it for this week, I am going to go back to enjoying the memories from Saturday of Pompey's first league win in over 3 months and no doubt CJ will be a relieved man with West Ham bagging the 3 points against the toffees.
Stay safe and for those of you in the northern hemisphere, wrap up warm, for those of you down south, I express no other emotion then envy!
Simon
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