30 Jun FIFA Best Women’s Coach Viz, Part One
Previously I took on 20+ years of data to look at voting patterns and nomination trends for the FIFA Best Female Player award. This go around, I deep dive into 10+ years of voting data for the FIFA Best Women’s Coach award.
While the data set is not as rich as that for the player award, it still holds curious trends and taking points worth visualizing and discussing.
This post focuses on slicing the nominations and winners by different categorizations. Part Two will provide a more detailed look at the voting.
FIFA coach - Nominees Viz
This viz has six separate tabs, each capturing a specific segmentation of the data for review. With 10+ years of data to present, filters are added where possible so you can construct your own view. Additional information for each tab is provided below.
Use the expand button in the bottom right of the viz to open a full screen view.
Nominees & Rank
This tab shows all the nominees cross-sectioned with the nomination year to display their vote rank. It provides a nice overview of the long list data set. Point of note – the rankings are based on the weighted vote percent for the nominees, and not the total voting points received.
Coach Representation
This tab visualizes the nominations, the top three vote getters, and the winners.
Former Netherlands head coach Sarina Wiegman has the most top three appearances with six. She has won the award 3x (2017, 2020, 2023) and holds the longest consecutive nomination streak (2017-2021). Germany head coach Silvia Neid has the most wins with three–a 100% nomination-to-win record.
More male coaches have received nominations over the years than female coaches (57% – 43% respectively). However, female coaches make up 58% of the total top three positions and 75% of the award winners.
Team Representation
This tab covers the teams associated with the nominees and winners. Unsurprisingly, senior national team coaches dominate the nominations and wins. This confirms the reliance on World Cup and Euro competitions (and qualifiers) in the voting process.
In respect to league teams, 8-time Champions League winners Olympique Lyonnaise have fielded four different coaches for their nine nominations. Reynald Pedros is the sole OL coach to win, capping a tremendous 2018 season when OL became the first team (women or men) to win three consecutive CL titles.
Geographic Representation
This data set unsurprisingly shows the dominance of European football and countries. Germany and France both have 17 nominations. This works out to 1.5 long list nominations / year.
The USA has a total of 14 nominations and the second highest number of top three finishes with six. Germany holds the most nominations with 15 with a 57% win rate. Interestingly, Germany has only ever placed first or second never third.
The Netherlands, Japan, and France each have five top three finishes each.
Region representation
It’s a bit depressing to look at this data from a regional perspective.
Europe dominates, understandably based on the nomination breakdowns, with the USA holding their own for the Americas.
Oceania and South America have the lowest representation with just two nominations each. Oceania’s relate to the Australian senior national team in 2011 and 2018. South America’s came in 2016 and 2018 for the Brazilian Senior National Team.
Africa has three nominations, the first coming in 2014 following Nigeria’s NT-U20 second place finish at the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup.
Fan Vote %
The fan vote was introduced into the award process starting in 2016. That vote is equally weighted with the other three groups to determine the final rankings.
While FIFA releases the final weighted percentages for the captain, coach, and media votes, it doesn’t provide this information for the fan vote. This tab is a visual of the guess-timated fan vote % each nominee would have needed to achieve their overall rank position.
In 2020, Sarina Weigman pulled her second win with an astounding percentage of her vote total coming via the fans. For 2021, Emma Hayes and Lluís Cortés were close in terms of overall top three placements. However, Hayes nabbed a significant segment of the fan vote and celebrated with her first win.
Check out FIFA Best Women’s Coach Viz, Part Two for a continuation of my data explorations in Tableau.