We recently met with VICE Motherboard to discuss our recent work with UEFA on the Euro 2016 Player Barometer. You can read an excerpt from the story below.
Words: Gabriela Barkho
The 2016 Euros may have wrapped up this month—with Portugal coming out as champions—but UEFA’s work is never done.
If you’d been watching the competition throughout the summer, you may have caught some fascinating player stats presented live by the Union of European Football Associations. Whether you’re a football/fútbol/soccer fanatic or just a casual fan, you’ve got to admit: being able to spew off fun player trivia to your friends is one of the best aspects of the beautiful game—but that’s never easy to do.
So, this year London-based data design consultancy After the Flood teamed with UEFA to present soccer data with a newer, more beautiful and consumer-friendly interface for Euro 2016. The project, dubbed The Player Barometer campaign, was designed to take the large amount of complex player stats tracked during every Euro match, and turn it into insights fans could easily interact with and journalists can use to build stories around.
Whereas previous stats were collected and presented with an old-fashioned interface and categorizations, After the Flood helped UEFA by creating player cards and Barometer pages in a new way.
For example, it ranks players according to what’s classified as an “event” during a Euros game. These events include incidents such as tackles, strikes or what commenters call a “dangerous run into the box,” meaning being inside the penalty box with a chance of a shot on goal.
“What we want to do is give fans a qualitative, not just quantitative, view of data,” Max Gadney, founder and director of After the Flood, told me. “This is a Barometer that lives and breathes as the scores come in.”