At After the flood we make products that last. We help companies create services based on data that have an ongoing use rather than creating one-off data-visualisations.
One example is our work for the UEFA 2016 European Championships Player Barometer, which has evolved into the UEFA FedEx Performance Zone. The interface allows fans to see detailed rankings and how they change over time, it also provides a tool for comparing their favourite players.
Star player information is a popular vector into the wider game for any sports fan.
The Castrol Performance Index, UEFA’s previous rating system, displayed a table of player rankings, e.g. ‘Adebayor is 4th with a score of 5.7895,’ but hid the factors of success and how that score was calculated.
This is a lost opportunity to give fans more to talk about and, crucially, a lost opportunity to build the confidence of new fans by teaching them how players are talked about and how their success is judged. UEFA have a good idea of their established fan-base and also the needs of their new fans. The new fans are the target for this work.
That’s why it’s good to see that in the Performance Zone, UEFA are testing the new player positions and playing styles we suggested. For instance, beyond just midfielders, you can search for ‘Winger’ or ‘Attacking Midfielder’.
Another innovation we developed with UEFA is reorganising the structure of the data so that categories like ‘Winger’ are appropriate and accurate to that position, e.g. ‘Successful final third passes’ or ‘11 crosses attempted’. This intervention in the structuring of categories is a response to user’s needs to talk about players. This allows new fans to gain confidence when talking about the game and helps engage more fans.
You can see the full service on UEFA’S website.