The Big World Cup Visualization Roundup

The hard facts are given: A team has 11 players, the ball is round and a match takes 90 minutes. But what happens in between? We’ve compiled a list of applications and visualization that strive to provide insights into the FIFA World Cup 2010.

World Cup 2010 Calendar

The World Cup 2010 Calendar by MARCA.com is an interactive schedule for the tournament. You can access information by national team, group, stage, stadium, city or date. Once you hover over a wedge, June 14th for example, you see all the matches that take place on that day (Go Cameroon!). The visualization does not provide any deeper insight that the end result but the matches are linked to the coverage on MARCA.com.

2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Game Tracker

Similar to the above mentioned schedule is the Game Tracker by Bristol based digital design studio Positive. It shows the upcoming game dates and results for past matches. The visualization is built in Flash and you rotate the circular schedule with simple drag & drop gestures. Again, not much insights about the matches, players or teams.

FIFA World Cup 2010

VisualSports has created a dedicated page for the World Cup matches. Every match for the group stage can be found in a table sorted by grouping. You can analyze the past matches with a visualization showing all cards, shots and substitutions that happened.

Twitter.com/worldcup

Another dedicated page comes from Twitter: You can “view” past and upcoming matches, which means that you get two parallel Twitter timelines with mentions of the playing teams. Honestly I don’t get much information out of this one.

Total Football 2010

With Total Footbal 2010 by Colm McMullan match analysis comes to the iPhone. For current and past matches the application offers different visualizations to dive into the data. The visualizations show information like the influence of each player, passes, placements of shots, tackles, clearances, fouls and so on. All match data updates in real-time. Of course the usual match stats like goalscorers, substitutions or cards are included as well.

World Cup Data Visualiser

The London based design & development studio Mint Digital comes this concept for an iPad application. It combines the football data from Picklivewith fun and intuitive analysis tools. For example, it allows you to compare cumulatively, or per match, all footballers in the World Cup across a variety of stats like goals, shoots on target, tackles and more. I haven’t found anything about the progress of this but they seem to have a working version of their Hamlock framework without the need of Flash which is apparently a necessity to run in on the iPad. See more images onFlickr.com.

World Cup 2010 Twitter Replay

The Guardian also leverages Twitter data to create the World Cup 2010 Twitter Replay application. It’s basically a timeline based visualization that represents Twitter hashtags as a bubble chart. On the timeline you can see important actions during the game like cards and substitutions.

Live World Cup Match Tracker

The New York Times uses a custom Flash application to support coverage of past matches. It’s a small little widget but filled with important information. A match can be analyzed in different ways to focus on ball posession (bubble chart), passes (lines) and area of play (heatmap). Shots are shown as cicles below the timeline. You can skip through the whole game by switching between notable actions. I think the NYT wins this round in regard of data density (and in my opinion also in regard of visual aesthetics).

I believe there are tons of other visualizations out there — if you come across something interesting, please let me know.

Via Infosthetics & FlowingData