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December 24, 2011

Heat Map: Manchester Derby Results Since 1907

5 comments

The Soccer by the Numbers blog continues to provide me great inspiration. After Manchester City destroyed Manchester United 6-1 on October 23rd (at ManU), they blogged about the results and provided a bit of statistical analysis.  City has long been the “noisy neighbors” to United, but they now are doing their best to buy a title, rather than grow their own talent.  Soccer by the Numbers posed this fundamental question:

We now know that the outcome of the match was truly unusual. But how unusual?

They created the table below, which is a frequency distribution of scored lines since 1907 of matches at Manchester United.  To use the chart you simply identify the score line by going across City’s scores then down ManU’s scores.  So the 6-1 scoreline has occurred 2.99% of the time since 1907.  Clearly this was an unusual result.

But I think this table could be improved.  I made these changes:

  1. Changed the numbers to percentages and rounded to one decimal.  Two decimals is unnecessary precision.
  2. Removed most of the gridlines so that the lines separate the data from the categories
  3. Formatted the results as a heat map.  I chose a red-white two-color scheme since Red is ManU’s color.  This makes the largest percentage of result very obvious.  For example, you can now easily see, without having to scan across all of the data points, that 1-1 is the most common score line…boring result!
  4. Formatted the totals as a second heat map.  I chose a brown-white scheme for these.  The totals show you the % of the total goals scored for each time.  ManU has scored one or two goals 64.2% of the time while City has scored one or two goals 58.2% of the time.

image 

Which format do you like best?  Does one make the story easier to interpret than the other?

5 comments :

  1. Nice chart

    Couple of additions ??

    1. Could we see a bar chart breakdown of ties (32.8%), United Wins (43.3%) and City Wins (24%)

    2. Once the user clicks the bar chart breakdowns, we can then provide them with a ranked order list of what event within that category happens the most - example, when they tie, 55% of the times the score is 1-1. When United wins, it is usually by 1-0 or 3-1

    3. THe chart that you have looks much cleaner... needless to say :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ujval,

    Great ideas! Sounds like you might be interested in doing that? :-)

    I thought about building something interactive, but I wanted the focus of the blog post to be on improving the table.

    Thanks for the comments,
    Andy

    ReplyDelete
  3. Am going to try :) But you are the Jedi Master here, I am just the apprentice :)

    I saw your comments on the main site - One question I had was is the balance swinging towards City or is it a one-off event that reflects their massive spending on players.

    This is what I love @ Tableau - you do one thing, it brings forth 4 questions that we can think of..

    Happy Holidays !

    Regards,
    Ujval

    ReplyDelete
  4. Andy

    Gave it a shot --> http://goo.gl/4vRw7

    I got data from Wikipedia that has the dates of the actual games but I struggled with a clean time line view (I did not realize their games go back a 100 years, amazing history !)

    Anyways, if you have the time to provide suggestions/recommendations, I can improve my novice Tableau skills

    This is the dashboard I have --> http://goo.gl/4vRw7

    Regards,
    Ujval

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Andy - adding the heat map to an otherwise plain table (as you have done) greatly reduces the time to "ah-hah", in my opinion.

    I took a crack at this data set here: http://dataremixed.com/2011/12/the-manchester-derby/

    Thanks for the inspiration!
    Ben

    ReplyDelete