ES
Exploration and innovation

An International Football Story: How to Analyze a Collective Game; Individually

29/06/2018
We have developed a data visualization that might help understand the possible outcome of different matches.

Many considerations play a role in the long and winding road to international football history. A single player -the cunning Maradona, the energetic Pelé, or the elegant Johan Cruyff- can change the football fate of an entire country; a single mistake can also bring a very well groomed squad to its knees against all odds -North Korea beat Italy in 1966 and came second in their group.

Data that tell a story

Predicting the outcome of a game or of the whole competition currently taking place in Russia is difficult, because so many unforeseeable off-model events can occur during any of the 90-minutes games in these 4 weeks. In order to help those who try to use some combination of data, football instinct and innate inclination to invest money unwisely to predict the exact score of a game in a pool betting (informally called porra in Spain, or polla in some parts of Latin America) we have developed a visualization that might help understand the possible outcome of different matches.

We have found a different use for a classification algorithm developed at BBVA Data & Analytics to distribute in a three coordinates spaces most of the players that are competing these days in Russia for football glory.

In our data story you can find more details about the results.

Notes

This data story has been developed by a team formed by a Data Scientist (Leonardo Baldassini), a visual storyteller (Iskra Velitchkova) and a communicator (Jairo Mejía) with little to no knowledge of international football. We have only used data that could be potentially enriched to return better results. All these insights have been extracted exclusively from data analysis and for research purposes only.