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Good afternoon #SportsVizSundayers!
It's been another frantic weekend of Premier League activity with three hattricks (as I write this, only the second half of Arsenal v Manchester United is left) and only two clean sheets, one of which was a rather unexpected one for Nottingham Forest away at Chelsea.
Something that was expected is more fantastic sporting visualisations, and it was great to see so many people having their visualisations chosen for the Information is Beautiful Awards 2023 longlist. Congratulations to everyone who had a viz chosen!
Before I dive into this week's visualisations, I'm pleased to say that the #SportsVizSunday challenge has returned! We've got two datasets to focus on: one from the recent Netball World Cup and one from the Women's Football World Cup. Check out the challenge page here for more details.
Moving on to this week's visualisations and I'm going to start with Tamas Szabo's look at the NFL record of the New York Patriots. Anyone who follows the NFL will be aware of the success of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and Tamas' viz shows this brilliantly with the red Superbowl wins clustered in one part of the circle. I like how Tamas has also combined an inner circle of head coach with the results from each season too, and that when you hover over a bar the details of that season appear in the centre of the circles. Very classy!
Sticking with American football, Evan Gower has highlighted how close the Michigan Wolverines are to 1,000 wins in college football (since he posted this, they did win their season opener and now are only 10 wins away). What stood out to me was the consistency of the slope of the line - cleverly coloured in the colours of Michigan's home kit - indicating that Michigan's success has been sustained over the decades.
Changing up the football theme, Ben Norland has produced a wonderful 'Sankhord' diagram showing the number of players that have moved between the big five European football leagues. Ben's used bold colours to great effect in this visualisation and it is rather eye-catching. It's also a great use of a chord/Sankey diagram and the large number of players who moved between Serie A clubs really stands out. Fascinating stuff all round!
If you're interested in finding out a bit more about Ben's visualisations - and who wouldn't be! - he sat down with CJ recently to talk about his designs and some of his favourite techniques. It's a really good read, I'd recommend checking it out.
Moving into Paralympic sport, Steph Blair has created a lovely Sankey to show off the British para-cycling team's most successful World Championships. The Sankey really helps keep track of who won which medals in a sport where riders can often win multiple medals and I found myself naturally looking along each different flow to understand how each event had unfolded.
Adam Green, a long time regular to these pages, has created a great tennis-themed visualisation to celebrate Andy Murray becoming only the eighth man to win 200 Grand Slam matches. I like Adam's use of tennis balls and Grand Slam colours to show the story. Sizing the tennis balls by length of match is also a clever touch, especially as Murray was involved in a lot of long matches over the years.
If Rugby is your thing then Carrick Blake has compiled a huge dataset of results and in-match info and shared it for you to find cool stuff! Carrick has also written a thread of some of the insights you can get from this data, focusing on Wales and Fiji.
Lastly for this week, it wouldn't be a #SportsVizSunday roundup without a tutorial from that man, CJ Mayes. This week he's looking at how you can improve a radial chart in Tableau. I'm a fan of radial charts - also called pizza charts from time to time - and they're having a very hot minute in football analysis as they are good for comparing performance in a number of different metrics at the same time. If you're interested in putting CJ's tutorials into practice then this month's challenge might also be of interest...
And that's it from me this week! As always, thanks for your wonderful contributions. It's always a pleasure and an inspiration to look through them.
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team
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