October 22, 2014

Infographic of the week

From the twitter of the Financial Times, “Interactive: who is the better goalscorer, Messi or Ronaldo?”

I assume on the FT site this actually is interactive, but since they have the world’s most effective paywall, I can’t really tell.

The distortion makes the bar graph harder to read, but it doesn’t matter much since the data are all there as numbers: the graph doesn’t play any important role in conveying the information. What’s strange is that the bent graph doesn’t really resemble any feature of a football pitch, which I  would have thought would be the point of distorting it.

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The question of who has the highest-scoring season is fairly easy to read off, but the question of “who is the better goalscorer” is a bit more difficult. Based on the data here, you’d have to say it was too close to call, but presumably there’s other information that goes into putting Messi at the top of the ‘transfer value’ list at the site where the FT got the data.

(via @economissive)

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Sam Warburton

    ‘Top ten highest number of goals by season 1999-2003’ had me trying to find the goals scored in 1999. And, as it was meant to be Messi vs Ronaldo, I wondered ‘were either of them playing/born back then?’, and why Suarez was in the graph when he’s neither Messi nor Ronaldo.

    Not clear why ‘share of minutes’ (presumably average minutes per game, rather than %) was a better number than total minutes.

    9 years ago

  • avatar
    Sam Warburton

    *1999-2013

    9 years ago

  • avatar
    Megan Pledger

    I think you really need to adjust in some way for “quality of opportunity” – a good player playing for a poor team is probably going to score less than an inferior player playing in a good team (depending on degree).

    I kinda like goals/shots on goal or maybe goals/minutes on attack.

    9 years ago