All the champions, all the goals

This chord diagram shows all the goals scored and conceded by all the FIFA World Cup winners, in all matches held between them (not only on World Cups). Hover over any team to see the total of goals scored and conceded by that team. Hover over any chord to see the relationship between two teams.

This chord diagram was inspired by the stunning Martin Krzywinski’s Circos (which I used to make my first, non-interactive version of this diagram), and based on a code written by Mike Bostock.

How to read this diagram?

The diagram shows all the 2427 goals scored on all matches held between the World Cup winners (Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Argentina, England, Uruguay). The very first think you’ll notice are the external arcs, where the names of the teams are written. The ticks outside the arcs show the number of goals scored by a given team:

Uruguay 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

Uruguay scored 364 goals, just a little more than the 350 on the label (each tick represents 10 goals). If you hover over Uruguay, you’ll see that Uruguay conceded 499 goals. Now let’s go to the chords. Each chord goes from one team to other. The width at each base represents the number of goals that that team scored (and that the other one conceded). The color of the chord is that of the team that scored more goals (that is, where the width is bigger). Let's see the data regarding England versus Spain:


0 50 100 150 0 50 100 150 200 250 Larger here... ...than here England Spain

The chord width is bigger at England’s end than at Spain’s end, meaning that England scored more goals against Spain than Spain scored against England. This can be easily seen by the color of the chord, which follows the color of England. Actually, even easier if you hover over the cord and see the tooltip.

Brazil is the only team with all the chords on its color, meaning that it’s the only team that, for each opponent, scored more goals than conceded. But there is a catch: The data is not up-to-date, I’m using the same data that I used for creating my non-interactive version, on June 2014. This means that the epic 7-1 is not here! If I update the data I’ll upload a new version of the diagram.

Source of the data: www.11v11.com