Visualising rankings
July 2009 (index)
This is based on the earlier article on football rankings. There we decribed how to calculate rankings for sports teams. Here we plot rankings for different seasons. This lets us look at questions like "which was the best/worst performance? (across many seasons)" and "how has competitiveness changed over time?".
We use the method of the earlier article to calculate rankings for each of the last 11 seasons for the English Premiership. We can plot these in various ways.
The first plots the names of teams with height on the page proportional to their ranking. (You really need to click to see the larger images.)
football rankings - height (click for large version)
The second plots team names on a regular grid with strong teams as black-on-white, and weak teams as white-on-black.
football rankings - shaded (click for large version)
They both show just how good and bad Chelsea (2004-05) and Derby (2007-08) were, and how close the 1998-99 season was. I like the way the mediocre teams (in the second image in particular) are illegible and only the extremes stand out. But the colouring on the second image doesn't make the differences as clear as the first image.
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