Interactive website: https://wimmerth.github.io/fifa-dashboard

Report: PDF

The football simulation FIFA is the most popular sports video game in the world1. While still being a simulation, to ensure an experience as realistic as possible, the players in the game have a number of attributes that are based on their performance in real-life. Through its popularity and detailed attributes that are well matched to reality, the video game often also serves as an indicator of which players are currently the best in the world.

While the game itself offers a very limited ability to compare two players, it only offers the ability to compare the current year’s attribute values (the game is re-released each year with new player values). The dataset used in this project, on the other hand, contains data from the last eight years of the game and thus brings in a new dimension, namely the evolution over time.

Career mode is an interesting feature of the FIFA franchise which allows users to become either a player or a manager over the course of the game. As a manager, the user is able to build teams and compete against other teams. An essential part of career mode is finding the right players for your team. That includes filtering by playing position, finding the best player for that position and making a trade-off between market value and player attributes. This can be a challenging task with more than 17,000 players.

The goal of this project was to develop an interactive dashboard that would allow for a more comprehensive analysis of player attributes. Furthermore, it gives users the ability to perform the task of a football scout, enabling them to find the best players for a specific area on the field. For this purpose, several different types of visualizations were developed and integrated into the website, available here.

This project was implemented together with Haileleul Haile as the final project for the Data Visualization Course at École Polytechnique under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Pietriga.

  1. According to https://www.rookieroad.com/sports/top-10-sports-video-games/. ↩