A couple of weeks ago, The Guardian put together a nice set of charts around the 2014 World Cup draw. As a newly minted soccer enthusiast, it was fun to go through and begin getting psyched about the summer. As a fan of data visualization, I was begging for a bit more and better. Besides the overabundance of pie charts, I thought it was missing some interactivity which could have made several of the points stronger.
Take the ‘Average strength of each group’ graphic. It’s a grouped bar chart of FIFA rankings by team for each World Cup group, ordered alphabetically; and on the right, it lists out (in text form) the average team ranking per group from high to low to give you a better sense of overall group strength. I like the grouped bars and the average team ranking metric, but I think an interactive chart here could have made the same points and been more effective (and more fun). For example:
2014 World Cup Draw - Strength of Groups
You can toggle between the grouped and stacked bar displays and sort the groups by avg. ranking or alphabetically. It could definitely still use refinement (e.g., more info on demand when hovering over bars, y-axis gridlines, etc.), but hopefully it’s a good start. I made it with d3.js, and you can explore the code that generates it here.
A few key takeaways from the graphic:
- Spain has the highest ranking by far, and Group B has a crazy big skill spread, with the best (Spain) and worst (Australia) teams in it
- Group G is strong all around, which gives it the edge over B in terms of average team ranking per group (as seen in stacked view)
- Among the top three teams in a group, there’s even more parity in Group D; Uruguay, Italy, and England are all within 100 points of each other
- Argentina (and Belgium) have fairly easy roads out of group stage
Can’t wait for the games to get started in June. Go USA!