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This is my first Sunday post-Super Bowl and I've just about recovered from the rollercoaster that was the last game of the NFL season, where the lead swapped hands on a couple of occasions. Another sporting rollercoaster - the Premier League - continues to twist and turn with Chelsea holding Manchester City to a draw yesterday. It is set up for quite a sprint finish with Liverpool currently leading Arsenal and Manchester City, and with Liverpool and City still to play their return fixture this season!
With that in mind, this week's #SportsVizSunday roundup is a welcome opportunity to enjoy some other sporting events and have a bit of a breather.
This week, Vivek is leading out the roundup with their radial visualisation showing Virat Kohli's remarkably consistent run-scoring in the Indian Premier League. I really like the yellow-orange-red colour palette that they've chosen, as well as their choice to double-encode the runs scored in each match using both colour and size. All in all, the visualisation is just as elegant and powerful as Kohli's batting!
I remember that we recently featured David Rudkin's previous visualisation about the rise of Leo Messi, because I had the pleasure to write the roundup that week and I was very impressed with it. He's now delivered a follow-up and it is just as impressive, if not more so. This time, David has looked more at Barcelona's tactical use of Messi under Guardiola, and how Messi's talents fitted the false 9 and tiki-taka strategies. In particular, I really like David's shot maps showing where Messi targets with this shooting. There's nothing disappointing about this sequel!
Ed Pham has been comparing NBA players, and built this really lovely radar/pizza chart comparison. I like how clean and well executed this visualisation is - it really allows the differences between the two players to be the centre of the story. I had quite a bit of fun looking at the small handful of NBA players that I regularly hear about and learning a bit more about their skills. Great work Ed!
With the Super Bowl only recently in the rear view mirror, Nathan Yau has visualised the number of NFL wins by each franchise - showing both overall and in a timeline. This is a great example of how you can use the same information but with a different focus to reveal different highlights. There's also something really interesting about watching the visualisation move between the two as well, as different bits catch my eye each time I watch it loop.
I'm going to finish the visualisations this week with Krisztina Szucs who is showing the swimming events from the 2024 Aquatics World Championships. Krisztina has previously produced this for other swimming events, and I think they are simply outstanding. Always worth looking at!
Actually, I'm going to squeeze one last visualisation in here because I published one of my own slightly earlier today. As usual, I'll talk a bit about what I was intending to create and leave you to decide how effective it might have been!
Having watched the Super Bowl last weekend, I wanted to create a more abstract visualisation to show the Kansas City Chiefs journey. I knew that the team colours could look striking together and I was inspired by the London tube map to think about lines and angles. The Chiefs run from bottom to top, with each of their (defeated) opponents running from left to right. Where the lines meet, they show the score for each match at the end of each quarter. I always like to use Tableau's interactivity too, and I use the tooltips to show the box score for each match at each quarter.
Last but very not much least, #SportsVizSunday own CJ Mayes continues to grow his template library. Not content with bridging the gap between football data and Tableau using Python, CJ has also shown how you can create Voronoi visualisations within Python too.
That's it from me for this week. Thanks as always for reading, and to everyone who is continuing to create fantastic inspirational visualisations.
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team