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It's nearly that time again, not Christmas but the PDC Darts World Championship (which in fact starts today!). Last year, the darts captured the hearts and minds of many with Luke Littler's meteoric rise. I've always enjoyed watching the darts - I think it televises incredibly well because everything happens so fast - and I'm excited to see who emerges on top this year.
Talking of emerging on top, the Formula 1 season has recently finished with Max Verstappen winning his fourth driver's championship. I have heard it said before that although a team doesn't want two potentially winning drivers, you do want a second driver that will push and motivate your lead driver. With that in mind, Dan Wade has taken a look at whether Max's teammate is potentially the worst teammate a winning driver has ever had. A couple of things stand out to me in this great visualisation - the gap between the winner and their teammate has increased over the years, and Perez is unable to get the same performance out of the car that Verstappen can. Personally I always think that's a good sign for the sport as it shows that skill is required, not just a seat in the fastest car.
Sticking with F1, Anastasiya has expanded her driver history visualisation to include more drivers. This is probably one of my favourite small visualisations that I've seen recently - it's incredibly clear, makes great use of colour and also uses the position of the block as well as the colour to add more impact to the message. I'm pleased to see that it scales up really well for drivers who competed in multiple teams, with multiple colours creating a very elegant look.
Stick with a (very vague) theme of encoding information in multiple ways, Chris Westlake has used two ways to show the results in Andy Farrell's career so far as the Head Coach of Ireland men's rugby union team. As well as using a bar to show the proportion of points won by Ireland and their opponent, he has also coloured the background of each fixture that was won - this acts as a great highlight for Farrell's remarkable win/loss record since he took over 2020. A fitting tribute!
In a first for our pages, the next feature comes from BlueSky where Lisa Hornung has created a beautiful design for your Year in Sports using Strava data, and made it available as an app too! I love the look of this - from the stripped back smaller summary bars/columns on the right hand side, to the centrepiece visualisation showing the activity on each day of the year. The concentric rings for multiple activities is a clever idea and really drives your eye to move through the year, while the different highlight colours provide a counterpoint to be able to assess whether different activities happened at different times. A wonderful work of art - check it out if you have Strava, as our very own CJ Mayes did.
And we're staying with the workout theme for our next feature, where Ali Tehrani has looked at his Peloton participation this year. Again, I love the centrepiece vs smaller summary graph design, and the calendar view plus vibrant highlight colour really shows off Ali's consistency in attending these classes! I also like the added extra detail in the tooltip of being able to see which classes Ali attended on any day, and for how long.
Last but not least, and in another edition to my growing "you can still do cool stuff with a simple table layout" section, Computer Cowboy has shown the frankly alarmingly good win/loss record for the Lions, the Packers and the Vikings in the NFL this season (hat tip to Sarah). These three teams have been increasingly dominant so far and I think we're going to be in for some great post-season games.
If you're stuck on how to get into Football Analytics, then CJ has the perfect interview for you. He recently sat down with Mohammad Adnan - who creates some really cool football visualisations and insights - to talk about his journey getting into it, and some of the resources he uses. I highly recommend giving this a read.
And that's it for this week! Thanks for reading :)
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team
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