This week I’m starting a new series of posts aiming to leverage Power BI to visualize data about a current event for that week. With the World Cup coming to an end today, I wanted to share some insights around the number of players from the Premier League that participated in the World Cup. In total there were 106 players that represented 26 different countries in this World Cup. Check out the report below to see the players by their nationality and the breakout of Premier League players across all countries.
Visuals Used in this Report
I used the ChicletSlicer visual for the players and flags, along with an Image URL to render the visuals for each. A Stacked Bar Chart was used to visualize the percent of players by Country, and Cards were used to provide the high-level numbers.
Other Notes
As always, the hardest part was getting the data and cleansing it. I used the Premier League website and FIFA.com to cross join all the Premier League players against the list of players provided by FIFA. There were lots of mismatches across the two datasets, such as the use of nicknames (Chicharito in one website versus Javier Hernandez in the other), omission of middle names, and the use of special characters (FIFA leaned towards omitting all special characters in players’ names). I used two separate websites to cross check the list against and validate my results.
To get the FIFA font, I downloaded it from the web and installed on my computer. I then created a PNG background using PowerPoint to display the World Cup icon, the report title, and blue background.
Lastly, I used a web scraping Chrome add-in tool for getting the data out of the FIFA/Premier League websites and into a consumable CSV format. The tool is called Web Scraper and it proved to be very slick and powerful, with lots of functionality. There is definitely a bit of learning curve, but I can see myself using this tool in future data extracts from websites (replacing my previous tool, import.io.
As always, feel free to weigh in with your comments below. And if you’re a France fan, Alle lez Blue!
This is awesome work, in one report you have handled many exceptions.
Good job ! Thank you.
Good stuff! Go Reds 🙂