Levelling the playing field in football knowledge

Ever felt out of your league in football chat? Can’t keepie-uppy with the conversation?

Hi, my name’s Chris Balmbra and I’m part of the Applied Technology practice within AtkinsRéalis, where I specialise in spatial data analysis. I’ve never been a football fan, but inspired by the IT Crowd, I challenged myself to turn this into a digital analysis opportunity!

I analysed football data throughout the life of the premier league using AI, GIS and PowerBI, and I’ve now produced an interactive cheat’s guide to football, which I can use to keep up with any men’s teams across the league.

To start, I scoured the web for the appropriate data, then loaded it into both GIS and PowerBI. When we’re working on pieces like this for clients, the focus is always on ensuring that the visualisation at the end is in the most intuitive and easily accessibly format. Since I was my own client in this case, I knew I want to combine spatial data and non-spatial data with dashboarding functionality as well.

The resulting interactive dashboard enables me to rapidly filter by season and by team, so that I can come up with all the relevant pub-quiz answers or talking points whenever I need to. 1998 key goal scorer for Aston Villa? Got him right here. The nickname for Bournemouth? Of course I know it’s the cherries. Did you see that ludicrous display last night? They needed 2009 Alan Shearer they did!

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Along the way I also took a look at some other stats. The graph below compares years in the premier league vs spend. On the right, the longest standing and highest spenders are Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Everton. Of these, Manchester United has had greatest value for money if judged by wins: 10 in all since the league started. Then Liverpool with 19, Arsenal with 13, Everton with 9, and finally Chelsea with just 6. As Chelsea’s the highest spender on the list it’s a shame they’ve not had more victories! But Everton are looking pretty good with their lower spend and good win rate.

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Now I’m well prepped for water cooler chat at the office, drinks down the pub, and football chat with the extended family at Christmas. And how about you: what data visualisations would help you ‘cheat’ in conversations? Or indeed, enable you to make better decisions in your professional tasks as well?

For me, the football is fun. But where I see real value outcomes from data analysis like this is in providing that really strong, up-to-the-minute insights source giving lots of resilience to decisions.? In my projects, this looks like auditable data availability logs, rapid collaboration, and really holistic decision-making, taking into account every angle. And being able to see and understand the data is the first step in all of that!

So whether you’re heading to a pub quiz*, a design meeting, or an operations sessions, make sure you’re able to take the data with you!

*Pub quiz cheating is discouraged! Data at your fingertips…but pre-quiz only.

?What’s the occasion?

Every year we celebrate the Applied Technology Practice by working together to post a different piece of fun or (and...) revealing data insight from our team every weekday, to showcase just what a difference the right data can make in any situation!

This year we’ll be sharing a range of materials, from details on a UK-wide survey of the sector, to personal videos, and of course, some weird and wonderful data, on subjects as wide ranging as football to hilltops. Follow along to see them all!