World Cup Hosting Dashboard created with Tableau Software

Posted on by Jen Stirrup
I haven’t had fun with Tableau for a little while, so now I’ve had some time to create my first dashboard using Tableau 6.0 
Basically, this dashboard aims to display the number of times that different countries, in different FIFA zones, have hosted the Football World Cup. A few things to note:
This dashboard is hosted at Tableau Public, so you can go and have a play!

  • A diverging colour palette has been chosen to distinguish the FIFA zones appropriately. Additionally, this uses the Gestalt principles of grouping close items together to connect the countries by their FIFA zone.
  • Instead of using blobs – or even flags! – to display the countries, I have chosen a clean, simple circle. I have done this in order to keep the display as simple and minimalist as possible, whilst still getting the point across. Edward Tufte called this the data/ink ratio, which basically means using the smallest amount of ‘ink’, or points on the screen, to get the point across.
  • Instead of using a pie chart to show the proportion that each FIFA zone has been represented, I have stayed with a clean column chart. I prefer this because:
    • it matches the left-to-right reading pattern of Western reading habits
    • The length of the column denotes the size, or value
    • It assists comparison between the various FIFA Zones.

Here is the dashboard. If you click on it, then it will take you through to Tableau Public and it’s straightforward enough to interact with the graph by clicking on the desired FIFA Zone.

Football World Cup Hosts since 1930

One point to watch here was the cleanliness of the data. I obtained this data from the Guardian Data Store, but as I’ve noted previously, Tableau does not recognise country names very well. In this case, Tableau originally did not recognise ‘England’ or ‘Russia’. These country names were replaced with ‘United Kingdom’ and ‘Russian Federation’ respectively. There would have been trouble if I’ve left out the occasion of 1966, where England hosted and won the FIFA World Cup. 

This was fun and quick to do. Enjoy! I look forward to your comments.

One thought on “World Cup Hosting Dashboard created with Tableau Software”

  1. Good job Jen,

    Any chance of adding South Korea to map as joint hosts in 2002? I know you got the data from the Guardian, would they need to alter their data first?

    Silverhawk

    Reply

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