Beyond the Game
The FIFA World Cup is one of the most famous sporting events in the world, dating back to 1930 when the first tournament was held in Uruguay. Over the years, the tournament has gained popularity, becoming a symbol of national pride for teams. This event also has extensive media coverage, with viewers from all over the world. To narrow our focus to a specific issue, we conducted a comparative analysis between the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2018 and FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019. Our goal was to investigate and bring attention to some of the underlying issues and stories that may be overlooked or marginalized within FIFA.
2023
Data Visualization
Adit Verma
Shipra Balasubramani
Data Physicalization
Data Encoding
Interactive Prototyping
Figma
01 / Approach
To conduct our analysis, we examined various attributes of both tournaments, including the host country and year, participating countries, overall attendance, and the total prize pool. Additionally, we delved deeper into the finals match of both tournaments, examining the finalists, goals scored, penalties, player of the match, global viewership, and prize money won by the winning team.
Furthermore, we wanted to create visualizations of the data from the last Men’s World Cup tournament hosted by Qatar in 2022, followed by a series of questions for users to analyze and speculate on the possibilities for the upcoming Women’s World Cup in 2023. Our hope is that this analysis will enable the audience to identify the differences and biases between the two tournaments and encourage them to become more involved and attentive to the Women’s World Cup scheduled for this autumn in Australia and New Zealand.
02 / Motivation
Our objective was to highlight the significant contrast between the prize pools for men and women by using distinct colours and shapes in our installation. Our aim was to effectively communicate our message by creating an interactive experience where participants can visually present the provided data. This was achieved by using engaging visuals to enhance the overall experience. Through this interactive experience we wanted to bring to light the unequal distribution of funds and gender biases in one of the most popular tournaments in the world.
Uncovering the stories and issues that surround FIFA can be a challenge due to its size, complexity, and transparency. Let us take a look into how the FIFA World Cup has evolved and gained popularity over the years.
This interactive data visualization enables you to interact with the data, explore, and identify patterns and relationships through the prism of gender-bias in the FIFA World Cup Tournaments.
06 / Encoding
We decided to work with tokens, as they are a simplified form of representing monetary value. We worked with Size & Shape, Colour Hue and Gestalt’s Principles of Proximity & Similarity. While analyzing the story the participants can interpret the data by encoding it through Color and Similarity (the placement of the tokens) to identify the Rank/ Winning position of the teams from each tournament. By applying the principle of Proximity and size, the participants will be able to understand the amount of money won by each team based on their winning position.
- Size & Shape represent monetary value in millions
- Colour Hue represents winning position
- The location on the table represents FIFA Men’s World Cup 2018 and FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019 tournaments
Since the intent of this exploration was to show the vast differences in the prize money won by each team between Men’s & Women’s tournaments, we decided to keep it simple. The visualization speaks for itself, as the biases are evident through the physical representation of the data.
08 / Placement
We envision the installation to be placed in Sport’s centers, Sport’s Bars, Gaming Arcades, Museums and Edutainment centers. The intent is to create a tech driven installation, where the tokens would be replaced by artefacts and the table would be replaced by an interactive touch table. This interactive experience is aimed to encourage people who are interested in learning about the issues that surround FIFA. This would include sports enthusiasts, journalists, academics, and anyone with an interest in international politics.
Interactive tables can be used to display and visualize data in a more intuitive and engaging way. They can enable users to interact with data in real-time, making it easier to explore patterns and compare the data. It also helps in increasing engagement by providing a hands-on experience for users. By allowing people to physically interact with the table and the artefacts, it encourages the participants to spend more time exploring and engaging with the data. By doing so, the data can also be updated each time the tournament takes place. This way more attributes and comparison points can be introduced for the participants to engage with. This would help in creating a complete data story, comparing the Men’s and Women’s Fifa tournaments.
07 / Critical Assessment
The main goal was to showcase the disparities between the Men’s and Women’s Football game with the help of visual cues in a cohesive yet an impactful way. Keeping in mind the feedback we had received for the physicalization assignment, we worked on those certain elements and expanded them further.
We used colours that were contrasting to each other so that the differences could be easily made between the categories. We wanted to bridge the gap between data visualization and the narrative by creating a storyline that included questions and prompts. To achieve that, we used those elements throughout the website. The main reason for this was to invite the viewer to take a look at this aspect of the game in a deeper sense.
While the main part of the story which includes the prize pool differences was the primary focus, we still wanted to include other elements of the game as well. This was done for different reasons such as making the story engaging and giving context to the viewers.
With limited time and tools in hand, we were able to record a video of the interactive web prototype. For the future scale of this project, we intend to create an interactive table prototype.
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03 / Goals
The intent behind this approach is to build the narrative based on a comparative analysis, by using readily available data. Our goal is to draw attention to gender biases and imbalances between two consecutive tournaments (Fifa Men’s World Cup 2018 and Fifa Women’s World Cup 2019). Our motivation statement remains the same where we uncover the stories and issues that surround FIFA; a challenge due to its size, complexity, and transparency.
04 / Audience
We envision the installation to be placed in Sport’s center’s,
Sport’s Bars, Gaming Arcades, Museums and Edutainment center’s. The intent is to create a tech driven installation, where the tokens would be replaced by artefacts and the table would be replaced by an interactive touch table. This interactive experience is aimed to encourage people who are interested in learning about the issues that surround FIFA.
This would include sports enthusiasts, journalists, academics, and anyone with an interest in international politics.
05 / Dataset
As discussed in our project proposal, we conducted a comparative analysis between the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2018 and FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019. During our research, we discovered that the Men’s World Cup was vastly different in terms of popularity, viewership, and prize pool compared to the Women’s World Cup. Our goal was to investigate and bring attention to some of the underlying issues and stories that may be overlooked or marginalized within FIFA.
For this project, we wanted to work with a specific dataset from the larger data collected from the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2018 and FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019 tournaments. We decided to pick one attribute to define our story; The Prize pool. In this category, we looked at the total number of teams participating in each of these tournaments, along with the prize money won by participating teams based on their winning position. By comparing these two attributes, we hope that this analysis will enable the audience to identify the differences and biases between the two tournaments and encourage them to become more involved and attentive to the Women’s World Cup scheduled for this autumn in Australia and New Zealand.
09 / Process
In terms of strategies to depict the visualizations, we as a team worked on ideating and sketching different ways of engaging the participants with our data story. We decided to work with materials with weight to represent monetary value. Since the activity encourages the participants to create their own visualization based on the data provided, it was clear that the participant working with Women’s data would require lesser time compared to the one working with Men’s data. In a way, we felt that the participant working with the Men’s data would feel some sort of frustration, due to the large amounts of tokens presented to them. This also helps in conveying the biases, the underlaying truth about the transparency and easy access/availability of data for Men’s categories as compared to the Women’s tournaments.
Although working with a specific attribute is efficient in conveying the message, we envision this installation to present a larger physicalization encompassing a more detailed dataset. Keeping in mind the intent and time assigned for this assignment, we decided to narrow down and focus on just one main data story.
Learning from the first prototype done during the physicalisation assignment, we were able to achieve the expected interactions and reactions from the participants. We wanted to take that forward and adapt this into an interactive platform, where users can interact with digital tokens to play around with the dataset while going through the narrative. The final application of this idea would be an interactive table with physical and digital artefacts, allowing participants to interact with the data in more than one way. We also received good comments and feedback during our class presentation, keeping that in mind V3 is aimed to be a refined version of V2 prototype.