11 Mar FIFA Female Best Player Viz, Part One
I love a good data set and thanks to a helpful person at FIFA I got my hands on 20 years of voting data for the FIFA Best Female Player award.
Voting patterns and results have always fascinated me so I thought, “hey, let’s throw this in Tableau and check what runs out.” So I did, and ended up with two vizzes to reflect my curiosity in the voting results.
This post covers my first attempt at wrangling the data; it focuses on slicing the nominations and winners by different categorizations. Part Two provides a more detailed look at the voting.
FIFA Player - Nominees Viz
This viz has five separate tabs, each capturing a specific segmentation of the data for review. With twenty 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. Some contextual information:
Brazil’s Marta is the first player (female or male) to win PotY in five consecutive years (2006 – 2010). Marta is also the youngest winner, receiving her first award at the age of 20. Venezuela’s Deyna Castellano superceded Marta as the youngest nominee in 2017. Germany’s Nadine Angerer is the oldest recipient at 35 and is the only goalkeeper (female or male ) to win.
Country Representation
This tab breaks down the nominations and the top three vote getters by country. For the ‘Total Nomination’s bar graph, the brown bar shows the # of nominations and the yellow the # of players nominated. Germany and the USA, by a wide margin, had the most of each.
105 players from 23 different countries have been nominated at least once. Germany has the highest number of nominations (44) by the highest number of players (22). The USA are next with 42 nominations for 13 different players.
Only 10 countries have made the top three. Brazil and the USA have each won the award six times and Germany five. 86% of all top three placements are from these three countries. Marta is the only player to win for Brazil, while four different players have won for the USA and three for Germany.
Region Representation
This tab really lays bare the disproportionate regional and global access to and reporting on women’s football.
European players dominate the nominee and winners list, accounting for 52% of all nominees. The highest number of European nominees occurred in 2021 with ten (of 12); the lowest number was 2012 with just one nominee.
2012 is the only year non-European players dominated the long list. North America had the highest number of nominees, with four from the USA and one from Canada. 2015 was the first year a South American player didn’t make the nominee list. A decade passed before an Oceania player made the nominee list again (2007 & 2017). Africa was last represented in 2007.
Position Representation
This data set really shows how high people hold attackers and goalscorers as the pinnacle of elite players. Forwards have placed first 13 times, second 19 times, and third 14 times. Midfielders have placed first 7 times, second 3 times, and third 6 times.
Only two defenders have ever made the shortlist (top three), with Lucy Bronze winning in 2020 (was third in 2019) and Wendie Renard placing third. As well, only two goalkeepers have made the short list, with Nadine Angerer winning the award in 2013 and Hope Solo placing third in 2015.
Fan Vote %
There was a social media uproar in 2018 when Marta was announced as the winner. It was a surprise, though not to a significant portion of the fans who voted.
The fan vote, interestingly, was only introduced into the award process starting in 2016. That vote is equally weighted with the other three groups to determine the final rankings. The 2018 fan results essentially neutralized the captain, coach, and media votes.
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.
Check out FIFA Best Female Player Viz, Part Two for a continuation of my data explorations in Tableau.