Weekly Roundup 10.19.25

Yes! It's been a while since our last blog, and there have been some good reasons for that. Many of the team have enjoyed time away, both for work trips and for well-earned breaks.

But we’ve also noticed some interesting changes.

We sense there’s been a bit of a move away from X (Twitter), or at least content has become a little more difficult to discover than before. It’s another reminder of how important it is to use the hashtag #sportsvizsunday—we look in Tableau and on LinkedIn and share as much as we possibly can within the round-up.

It’s also sparked some good conversations among the team about whether there’s a better medium or channel to promote your stellar vizzes. So if you have ideas, please do drop us a line. We want to keep highlighting the best that’s out there in the sports data viz community.

Personally, I’ve been away for a little while myself, so I haven’t caught up on too much sport lately. I did take positive note of England qualifying for the World Cup—job one complete! The bigger challenge, of course, comes next year in North America. Whether England will win, who knows—but it does feel like we finally have an identity under Thomas Tuchel, which may stand us in good stead for next summer.

The Ryder Cup may feel like a distant memory now, but it was certainly one of the sporting highlights of the year for me. Europe’s domination over the first couple of days led to those “how many will they win by?” conversations on Sunday, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.

The USA came surprisingly close, and at one point, Europe were just searching for something to hold onto. In this visualisation by Scott Barber, a simple but effective timeline shows the progression of points won with Europe’s lead growing through the pairs before the USA began to close the gap. By matches 24–26, Europe just about get over the line, first to retain the Cup, then to win it outright. I also enjoyed the use of colour in the title and lines to tie it all together.

We move on now to a quantified self view from Yash Sakhuja, who’s visualising the summer of 2025 through the bike trails they've completed. There’s a huge amount of mapping content here—distance covered, time spent, maximum speed, elevation gain—all explorable in Tableau. I particularly like the sparing use of red as an accent colour; it makes the key metrics and routes pop beautifully. A really clean, engaging design for those who love mapping and movement data.

Next up, Naresh Suglani brings us a fantastic infographic-style view looking at the most dominant F1 cars in history. Starting with Red Bull’s 2023 season—where Max Verstappen won almost every race—the viz steps back through the decades to show other dominant eras: McLaren in the 1980s, Mercedes in 2015 and 2016, and Ferrari in 2002. The dashboard layout works brilliantly, showing the proportion of races won, pole positions, and points per race. That last metric gives a great sense of whether dominance came from a single driver or the team as a whole. Another superb piece of work from Naresh.

Now, I'm pretty jealous of our next contributor, Anastasiya Kuznetsova, who had the opportunity to attend the recent Baku Grand Prix in Azerbaijan! In this Tableau viz, she tracks driver placings throughout the 2025 season using a bump chart. The highlighting feature makes it easy to focus on your favourite driver and see how consistent (or not) they’ve been. The papaya orange of McLaren dominates the view, but the movement through the chart tells plenty of other stories, too. Great work, Anastasiya, and I hope you had a great time!

A brilliantly simple design next from Lev Akabas, showing the number and location of NFL international games over time. Starting in 2007 with just the UK, the chart shows how the league gradually expanded to Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Spain, and Ireland, culminating in seven international games in the 2025 season. It really highlights how global the NFL has become. I still doubt we’ll ever see a Super Bowl abroad, but it’s certainly a fascinating trend to watch.

Finally, we end with cricket and a colourful look at the champions of various major tournaments. Aakarsh R's design takes a Voronoi-style approach, plotting each tournament by country and colouring by number of wins. It’s a fun, artistic way to show dominance: Australia, unsurprisingly, lead the way, but it’s good to see plenty of variety, with England, India, South Africa, and New Zealand among others all well represented.

Back to baseball now with Rafael Guevara, who’s taken on the remarkable 27-season career of pitcher Nolan Ryan. His dashboard explores strikeouts, games, shutouts, and other key stats in a way that really conveys the longevity and dominance of Ryan’s career. A great tribute, beautifully structured in Tableau.

Great work, everyone—another brilliant set of visualisations across a range of sports and styles. Thanks, as always, for keeping the #SportsVizSunday community thriving.

That rounds things up for this week. Again, as I mentioned in the intro, any ideas on how we can best receive and distribute this content to our viewers, readers, and watchers are gratefully received as we look to continue the momentum behind this wonderful community. Thank you very much, and see you all soon.

Simon & the SportsVizSunday team