Over the weekend, Reader Ben Jones sent me a message on Twitter pointing me to this post by @kmgfootball, which he thought would be great for a Makeover Monday example.


The point the writer is trying make is clear: Barcelona & Real Madrid combined get almost as much revenue as the rest of the clubs in La Liga, whereas in the Premier League, there's much more parity and revenue sharing. The problem is that the charts are basically unreadable.

1. There are 20 slices in each pie.
2. Each slices contains way too much content: team logo, team name and revenue, yet it lacks the percentage each team takes in, which is more meaningful than the revenue in this case.
3. The image is blurry.
4. The fonts are tiny.

I recreated the data and used Tableau to build a lollipop chart instead of a pie chart.


I chose a lollipop chart because I wanted to show the data in a bar chart view, but accentuate the end points. I then color-coded the dot on the end of the lollipop by the revenue and kept the range consisted across the leagues. In addition:

1. I kept the scales for the bars the same on both charts so that you could see how the leagues compare to each other.
2. I converted the Pounds to Euros (1 british pound sterling = 1.26 Euro) to make the data more comparable.
3. I included the share of revenue as a label on the lollipop.

This view makes two points very obvious:

1. There are only two teams that matter to TV networks in Spain.
2. The Premier League is very, very rich. The team will the lowest revenue allocation is higher than the third highest team in La Liga.

How would you visualize this data differently? The lollipops are merely one approach. Download the Tableau workbook here and leave a comment with a link to your version.