World Cup Performance - BBC Redo 1

The above visualisation is one I came across recently in a BBC article ahead of the 2023 Women’s World Cup. It attempts to show historic performance by all teams by encoding the data in the following way:

• The number of times a team has reached a particular stage is represented by the size of the bubble

• The position of the bubble represents the stage reached, starting from Group Stage on the outside and World Cup Winner on the inside

On initial viewing of the visual, I had a view questions that I was looking to answer:

1. Which team has won the most world cups?

2. Which teams have the best and worst performance at previous world cups?

3. What is England’s record at World Cups?

4. Are there any other quirks in performance, for example teams reaching multiple finals but not winning or never getting past the group stage?

These questions seem pretty standard, but the visual is not built in a way to support answering them easily. In fact, the visual has several issues that makes it generally unintuitive to read:

• We are immediately drawn to the cluster of large bubbles in the bottom left of the visual, due to the choice of encoding the data with bubble size. However, this seems to be a quirk of sorting the axis alphabetically in combination with Nigeria, New Zealand, and Noth Korea all having reached the group stage multiple times.

• Following bubbles back out from the centre to the axis is difficult due to the number of teams, partly due to the inexplicable decision to include teams that are appearing at the 2023 World Cup for the first time and therefore have no data for previous world cups.

• This is also made more difficult due to the same colour being used for both data and non-data elements of the visual.

• The circular axis makes it hard to compare countries to each other.

• This is a slightly petty one, but Mexico is upside-down.

So I thought I could do a bit better!

I set myself the challenge of creating an improved visual using nothing but the default visuals and functionality in Power BI. As we’re making a comparison between teams where larger values are better, a bar chart seems to be the most suitable choice.

We want to emphasise the best World Cup performance, so let’s sort the visual by the count of world cups attended and filter out the teams that have no previous results. We also want to make it easy to see World Cup wins, so let’s change the Stage colours emphasise wins.

However, the sort order still isn’t right. Because the top five teams have attended all world cups, they are being ordered alphabetically instead. I had originally created a [Stage - Sort] column in the Power Query Editor to sort the Stages in the Legend:

= Table.AddColumn(
#"Changed Type", "Stage - Sort", 
each if [Stage] = "Group Stage" then 1 else
if [Stage] = "Last 16" then 2 else
if [Stage] = "Quarter-Final" then 3 else
if [Stage] = "Semi-Final" then 4 else
if [Stage] = "Final" then 5 else
if [Stage] = "Winner" then 6 else 0, 
Int64.Type)

Let’s change the value for “Winner” to 200 to make sure a team that has won the World Cup always shows above one that hasn’t. Now let’s create a measure in our model that multiplies the [Count] column, which counts the times a team has reached a stage, by the new [Stage - Sort] column:

Country Sort = 
SUMX(
    'World Cup History',
    'World Cup History'[Stage - Sort]*'World Cup History'[Count]
)

This results in the following values:

Now if we add this our bar chart’s tooltip so we can use it to sort our axis, and then make a few other visual changes to reduce clutter and enhance readability, we get the following visual:

Which I think does a much better job than the original!