The Making of... Most Exciting Premier League Seasons

Last week, I posted my 45 minute visualisation on the most exciting Premier League seasons, plotting the champions, the team who came 4th (Champions League qualification) and the team who came 17th (survived relegation)

I created this on the train, so all I had was my phone, the internet (namely statbunker.com) and Tableau. And using a very simple table, I was able to visualise a basic story in a way (which I hope) is understandable by all.

First I started off with my headers; the main thing I wanted to show was how many points were achieved by the team who came first, fourth and seventeenth in each of the last 20 seasons. This meant the headers I used were Season, 1st, 4th, 17th and under each of the ranks was the number of points achieved. Given this 4 by 21 sized table, I imported it into Tableau and got this.

I didn't need any other fields for this visualisation. First, I dragged Season to Columns and then Measure Values to Rows. Measure Values brought in each mark for every season - including number of records (which I didn't want) so I promptly dragged off from the Measure Values card. This gave me a stacked bar, totalling the number of points. That's great, but really I want to show the range between each of my three positions - this meant I changed my mark type from Automatic to Circle.

Nice. Then, using the Analytics pane, I added a Box Plot to the canvas, and formatted it so be 'Classic', with no fill and changed the colour of the reference lines to a grey. 

Next I dragged Measure Name to colour, and also to Label. As I wanted the Label to be in the middle of each bubble, I amended this accordingly using the label >  alignment and choosing the middle and the centre. But now I also wanted to show the value of each bubble - so I also dragged Measure Values to label, reformatting the number (right click > format > default number > change decimals to 0).

The rest was formatting;

• I chose a font I wanted to use throughout - in this case, I used Maiandra GD

• I resized the bubble to be a bit bigger to have each both the points and position on the dashboard

• I rotated the labels at the bottom (right click the axis - rotate label)

• Changed the Label colour to white as I felt it worked better than the default charcoal Tableau had used

• Right clicked on the view, and clicked 'format' and navigated to the borders section. Here I increased the level of the Column Divider and changed the Pane to a dotted line

• Right clicked at the top where it said 'Season' and hid the field name for rows

• Cleaned up my tooltip, and set it to my custom message

At this point, I started building my dashboard and once I'd done adding text fields, my title, some blanks, a transparent version of the Premier League logo & changed the Dashboard background to a transparent green (Dashboard > Format)

Here's where I (slightly) cheated my 45 minutes; after my initial upload, I was showing my colleague - he immediately asked me who was Champion in 2004-05. Bummer! I'd not bothered to add the team names. I bandied with the idea of adding the data to my original table - though that would mean pivoting the data (probably). 

So rather than adding more rows to my data set, I simply opened my Excel workbook & used added a table with a blend on season.

Finally, I cleaned up my tooltip to ensure that it incorporated the blend & informed the user who was in each position for each given year.

Season: <Season>
<Measure Names>: <Measure Values>
Champions: <Sheet2 (epl points).1St>
4th place: <Sheet2 (epl points).4Th>
Escaped Relegation: <Sheet2 (epl points).17Th>

And the rest was adding and formatting the dashboard. I didn't like the key that came with my box plot, so I deleted it and created my own 'key' which I was able to customise a bit better (using Measure Names and Measure Values again) and have them on one line. Then 3 text fields, 1 image and 1 blank later I was ready to publish!

I even came back to it and added a dark version!

Not bad for ~45(ish) minutes work! Let me know what you think and if you have any more questions, let me know.