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Happy final day of the Premier League (and indeed the Fantasy Premier League) to all those who celebrate.
There isn't much at stake at the top end of the Premier League table with the winners, Champions League places, and Europa League place all wrapped up. But there is an awful lot at the bottom end of the table with three teams competing for the single remaining spot to avoid relegation! Not to mention the three teams competing for the Europa Conference League spot which can be an excellent boost.
Appropriately enough, I'm starting with a fantasy football themed visualisation this week.
In a bid to help his fantasy Premier League prospects, Harry Osborne has created this beautiful business-style dashboard to showcase different important player metrics, and allow him to identify the best players.
I really like Harry's style in this dashboard. It is incredibly clean, and he has used tabs to split out different pieces of information for different purposes. This makes it very easy to engage with and get insight from. He's also used a lot of clever design touches to elevate it, including using the same colour to indicate highlights throughout as well as minimising labels where they don't add anything.
I'm hoping that Harry will continue to update it for the next season...
Next up is Tina Covelli with an insightful look into how you can see the impact of this season's baseball rule changes in the stolen bases metric. Tina is well known for expertly blending narrative with visuals, and this is no exception. It's clear that the rule changes are affecting the base-running decisions batters make!
Mark Cavendish, the legendary Manx Missile, announced he would be retiring from professional cycling at the end of this season. Cavendish is probably the best road cycling sprinter of all time, as well as being no slouch on the track!, and I previously created a visualisation to celebrate his 34th stage win in the Tour de France. (That meant he became the joint holder of the record for most stage wins, something that is very unlikely to be overtaken any time soon).
In honour of his retirement, I revisited my visualisation (say that 10 times fast) to focus more on his stage wins, and days spent in the green and yellow jersey, and to challenge myself to make the design much more simple. This is where I ended up and I'm pleased with the result.
This article and accompanying visualisation from Ryan Best at FiveThirtyEight caught my eye this week. Ryan has looked at the consistency of each team in the Premier League to create a "fingerprint" for each team. It's a wonderful idea which shows easily which teams are more consistent, and which players are key to their consistency. It's also prompted some great discussions about how consistency and performance could interact (this is something which Ryan notes isn't particularly strongly correlated in his article too).
Lastly, I'm going to take a moment to celebrate this thread from Caoimhe O'Neill in which she picks out a couple of her favourite James Milner stats in this twitter thread. Could there be a more complete touch map? Apart from the opposition penalty area which is conspicuous by its absence.
And that's it for this week. Apologies that it is a touch more football heavy than usual but I imagine that there will be a bit of a break over the summer for some other sports to shine.
Cheers
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team