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It's been a great weekend of sports so far with Maidstone showing that the FA Cup still retains its magic; Sinner & Sabalanka winning the Australian Open despite having only won one Grand Slam between them beforehand; the West Indies and England test cricket teams springing turnarounds that simply can't happen in the shorter forms of the game; and the continued rise of Luke Littler. And that's without the NFL Championship rounds which are still yet to come this evening.
With so much sport in the air, it's a joy and a pleasure to take some time out and see what the #SportsVizSunday community are thinking about.
I'm going to start this week with cricket and Rob Radburn's exploration of how often test cricket nations change their personnel in their teams. To start with, I like Rob's choice to reverse the y-axis so that keeping the team the same is given visual priority by being higher. What stood out to me was that the teams which have more consistent lineups tend are more likely to go a few matches with a consistent lineup and then make sweeping changes, rather than changing a handful of players from match to match.
Football is next up, and Naresh Suglani has produced this absolutely stunning visualisation showcasing Premier League football stadium capacities and their immediate surroundings. This visualisation is super - the colour scheme is inviting and works so well with the small maps. The overall effect is very striking!
Ben Norland has also visualised football, although he has been looking at football teams rather than stadiums. There is a lot I love in this visualisation - firstly the interactivity and colouring are great. The graphs highlight the comparable teams as well as the selected team, and clicking on any given team makes it into the selected team, whether that's on the side panel or the scatter graphs. My favourite design element though is Ben's choice to leave the axis without tick marks, and to create natural language axis labels rather than just using the metric names. This makes it very easy for the viewer to understand the significance of each team's position on each graph without needing to get into the technical understanding of each metric. A great choice in my opinion!
Over on LinkedIn, Daniel Sedin has written about his motivation and process for summarising his Strava data and creating a dashboard to support his running goals. I really like the elegant and focused design that Daniel has created - the colour scheme is really effective and works particularly well in his calendar view. I very much enjoy how the different activity types change depending on the time of year.
This week saw longstanding community initiative #MakeoverMonday feature a sporting dataset of the highest paid athletes. Anastasiya used this dataset to create some really attractive filled-bars showing the split between on- and off-pitch earnings for the highest paid athletes (some of the differences are very surprising!) but for some reason the bit that really caught my eye was the stacked bar graph of the athletes' ages. There's something pleasing to my eyes about the shape of the boxes and their colours!
A couple of other #MakeoverMonday entries also caught my eye while I was scrolling; Kevin Flerlage's insight-packed beeswarm:
Michael Fajemilehin's sophisticated line plot and paired diamonds:
and Adrian Zinovei's lovely pie graphs:
If you like these then I'd recommend searching for the #MakeoverMonday hashtag on X/Twitter, or downloading the data and seeing what insights you can find. Sorry to all those who joined in with the initiative but aren't featured above! If you're creating a sporting visualisation, either for your own curiosity or as part of another initiative then you can always bring it our attention using the #SportsVizSunday hashtag.
Naresh's second feature this week is a repost but it is too good not to include again. Originally created in 2020 to celebrate Liverpool FC's manager Jurgen Klopp, and reposted this week following Klopp's surprise announcement that he will be leaving at the end of this season, this visualisation is packed with information and typically innovating designs. Well worth another look!
One man inspiration-template machine, and resident of these proverbial halls, CJ Mayes has showcased this week some radar/pizza charts that he has made in Tableau. Check out his website for more tips and tutorials if you want to create Tableau magic like he does!
Lastly, and to return to where I started by talking about the FA Cup, they say that a picture is worth 1,000 words and this is a very recent and compelling example!
May the next week being you all the sporting outcomes that you are hoping for.
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team.
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