Hi all,

It has been a while since I posted here. This one’s just for fun.

There are two exciting men’s football (aka ‘soccer’) tournaments going on right now – Euro 2016 and Copa America. I was wondering which players in the history of the sport have the highest number of goals scored over the course of their international careers. The data was fairly easy to find on Wikipedia, and since I’m somewhat fond of scatterplots, I created this simple viz to help me understand who has been the most prolific at putting the ball into the back of the net:

Some notes about the project:

  • The viz features three filters – Confederation and Career Status selectors, as well as a Goals per match slider.
  • I annotated the player with the highest goal scoring rate (Poul Nielsen of Denmark) since the relative sizes of the flag shapes are much harder to compare than the x- and y-axis positions of the shapes.
  • I used a dual axis on the scatterplot to create a yellow border around the players who are still active. I also added a note in the bottom right explaining the meaning of the yellow outline.
  • In order to figure out if the player is still active, I created a calculated field called “Active?” that looks at the value in the field “Career End” and assigns a value of “Active” if it’s null, and a value of “Retired” if it’s not null.

That’s about it. I enjoyed the process, and learned something new about a sport I love.

Thanks, I’d appreciate any feedback you might have, as always.
Ben