Warning : This week's round-up may be filled with "It's Coming Home" references and other references strongly favouring an England win at tonight's historic European Championship Final.
Right now that's out of the way, if you are still reading I assume you are going to humour me and allow me to be way more excited than a 40 something sports data geek should be! The Euros this year have been an outstanding tournament and it is fair to say for England and Italy fans it will be one that will long live in the memory. Tonight's final will be the first I have seen in my lifetime that will have my beloved England in it and, I am going for an England win by a single goal.... just a win by any means possible other than penalties, please!
As it happens, football in general, has been a source of data viz inspiration this week. First up a massive congratulations to Damola Ladipo who was rightly awarded Tableau Public Viz of the Day for his Racial Bias in Soccer Commentary visualisation. Not only was the topic a really interesting and worthwhile one to showcase, but the visualisation was data viz at its best, from the chart type, to the colour, through to the text and labelling, the design was just fantastic. Congratulations Damola.
Also on the subject of football, and this time, focusing on the Euros, Krisztina Szucs created this amazing gallery of Euro 2020 matches after the round of 16. Her design was simply stunning and is another example of what can be achieved using D3, click on the image or link in the tweet and sit back to enjoy the animated version.
Lastly on the football related vizzes we came across this fantastic #IronViz entry by Anna Kourouniotis on the subject of "Equality in Female Football". The viz is packed with interesting stories, backed up by strong analysis and a really clean design. Congratulations Anna on not only participating in #IronViz but also drawing attention to Women's Football and in particular the focus on the US Women's National Team.
Believe it or not, the #SportsVizSunday community have been creating some non football related content this week and this viz by #SportsVizSunday regular Samuel Epley was one of the stand out vizzes for me this week. His analysis of MLB Elo Ratings was inspired by Ryan Sleeper and the minute I saw it I just immediately thought of Ryan, the design is so clean, the use of labelling is minimal whilst still offering key insights and the colours are used really intelligently, great work Samuel!
Keeping with bat and ball, but this time moving to cricket, Devin Bhatia celebrated MS Dhoni's 40th birthday by visualising his amazing One Day International career.
Those of you who have the pleasure of knowing #SportsVizSunday co-lead Kate Brown, will know how keen a golfer she is, and this week she treated us to a golf viz showcasing all the municipal courses in Massachusetts. There are some great techniques going on under the hood, so I'd thoroughly recommend not only checking it out but also downloading it and admiring the build.
To finish this week we focus on our #SportsVizSunday July Olympics challenge which went live last weekend. The data contains over 100,000 records, containing every Olympian, every sport and every medal since the first modern Olympics in 1896. You can check out the data here, but in the meantime you can also be inspired by the vizzes that have already been created as part of the challenge.
First up I had the pleasure of collaborating with Neil Richards to create our 'Olympic Scorecards', an analysis of nations that have dominated Male and Female events by winning at least 5 medals and 3 medals, respectively, across a sport. I really enjoyed the design process that Neil and I went through and the final creation may have had a little bit of tetris about it, as we tried to fit in all the different shapes caused by the variety of sports and nations within each element of the viz.... oh and be warned it's a bit of an epic at 10,000 pixels high!
It only took 3 days for Jun Yan to explore the data and create his '120 years of the Olympics' analysis. The small multiples of which nations have won gold, silver, bronze or no medals was a really interesting take on the data.
Finishing up this week we have two visualisations by Frederic Frey from Australia. His first creation used celebrated all the medals at each Summer Games.
Whilst his second viz had more than a tinge of controversy about it as he analysed all of the athletes stripped of their medals in the modern games era.
That's all for this week, another fantastic effort by the #SportsVizSunday community, keep up the great work and keep those Olympic vizzes coming in.... and of course, the final word goes to our Three Lions ahead of tonight's game.... and nobody can say it better than Atomic Kitten.... yes Gareth, "Southgate you're the one".
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