A Data Visualiser's Lament - World Cup 2026 version

[redfiona99]

While there are many good reasons to be happy about the expansion to 48 teams (say hello to Curacao, Jordan, Cape Verde and Uzbekistan) and reasons to be unhappy about it (they have blatantly made it easier for the big teams to qualify, only Italian [hand gestures] has prevented all the big teams already being in), I fear I may have the most pathetic reason for objecting.

Bother, I have to put 48 x 26 players into my Gephi chart by hand.

I suspect my diagrams will be late.

There must be a way to do it automatically, but I have not found it yet. James Ashford wrote a really nice post on how to do all of this with Python - https://james.ashford.phd/2023/08/25/analysing-the-2023-fifa-womens-world-cup-with-graph-theory/ and I swear I will learn Python at some point.

Comments

[ionelv]

It has been suggested that I check out your blog about the FIFA WC. Nice. Here is a stats post I made earlier today: https://ionelv.dreamwidth.org/196660.html

[redfiona99]

The more the merrier :)

I am particularly interested in that 43% are in the Euro top 5 leagues stat because I swear that percentage has been increasing over the years.

[ionelv]

The 43% (637 of 1478 current squad players of remaining 64 teams) play in these 5 countries:

261 17.659 England
108 7.30717 Germany
105 7.10419 Italy
90 6.08931 France
73 4.93911 Spain

If the final 6 will be the highest FIFA ranked teams from their playoff brackets, the top 5 will account for 471 of 1080 players of the final 48 teams (43.6%):

182 England
84 Germany
77 Italy
72 France
56 Spain