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This is one of my favourite times of the sporting year - NFL postseason time! After an 18 week season to establish who competes in the postseason, everything from now to the Super Bowl itself is single game knockouts. As you would expect, this creates the environment for the some of the best performances of the whole season (and also some of the most haunting/bizarre mistakes). Wonderful stuff.
Wonderful stuff is also how I would describe this week's #SportsVizSunday roundup, so let's get cracking!
First out of the gate this week is David Rudkin's Premier League xG scatter chart. Using xG to explore which teams are creating better chances (or are giving up good chances to their opponents), David has taken a really clever approach to picking two metrics than can be combined to make a third, and all three metrics tell a different part of the story. He's also contrasted the xG metrics with actual goals per game which takes the total metrics on display to four, and yet it remains clear to read. A great design, and a really strong example of focusing on how to build the insights you want your audience to take away.
Dan Wade is nearing the end of his marathon visualisation challenge (and has created a seriously impressive body of work along the way, I hope you're very proud of it Dan!) and was inspired to show his favourite moments of this season in Formula 1.
I really like the design of this, and how it evokes a road/race track. The annotations look super slick too, and overall it's a really elegant visualisation to look at. Nice work Dan!
Our collaboration with #BackToVizBasics continues to deliver incredible results, with yasushi_ishikawa taking a turn at the three datasets. Two things really jumped out at me from their visualisation this week. The first is the way they've shown the points contibuted by the two drivers to their teams in the F1 Constructor's Trophy - the circles make it really clear to scan along and see the insight that they've pulled out about Bottas' contributions. The second is my favourite, and that is the colour scale on the tennis Wimbledon winners showing the decade that the tournament was won. Combined with the innovative choice to make one row per country, this creates a fascinating view of how some countries have ebbed and flowed, while the US have remained ever-present. Very cool!
Moving now to LinkedIn, Jordan Pickles has shared a wonderful end-to-end project to collect and visualise shot location data, resulting in a very attractive dashboard showing both where teams score their goals and also where they concede them. The insights revealed by this dashboard are really interesting, and it's great of Jordan to share all his code for the whole process too! A great resource for any aspiring analysts to check out.
And last from LinkedIn, I wanted to highlight a really interesting article from Andy Kirk. Motivated by his dislike of draws in football - and full of clever and informative visualisations, as you would expect! - Andy has dived into where the missing point goes. It was an fun and engaging read, I'd recommend it for any football fans.
I'm going to round up the roundup with a couple of community notices.
The next Sports Tableau User Group is on Thursday 6th February at 12PM EST (5pm GMT). We've got a stellar pair of speakers in Riley Martin (the founder of SportsBall - you should check them out if you haven't already, they do wicked sports visuals) and Romain Lopez (who will be giving us the inside line on sports analytics in American collegiate football/soccer). Check out more details on the link below and RSVP if you're up for it!
CJ, Simon and myself sat down last week to talk about some of our favourite vizzes from the #SportsVizSunday community in 2024. There was a wealth of amazing things to choose from, and we had great fun discussing our favourites with each other. Check it out on Youtube!
And that's the end of this week's roundup. Bring on the rest of 2025, I can't wait to see what visualisations are waiting to be created...
Mo and the #SportsVizSunday team