I Need A Striker for My Team! Who Is He Going to Be?
By: Efe Buyuk
Tags: Data Science, Tableau, Football Analytics, Sports Analytics, Data Analysis

I Need A Striker for My Team! Who Is He Going to Be?

Photo by Fachry Zella Devandra on Unsplash

Intro

In this article, we are going to try to find our striker for our team! In a hypothetically scenario, we have a team in FIFA 19 football simulation video game, and we have a very big budget! :) First, we analysed our squad and decided that we need a very good striker for our team. Here I can ask;

Who is your favourite striker in FIFA 19?

Of course, you can answer this question instantly according to your experiences in the game. However, there is an alternative way to answer this question. Data Analysis! :)

By the way, if you reached this article directly from somewhere, I also suggest you reading the series’ first article. You can reach it out from this link.

About the Tableau in Data Analysis

Tableau is one of most powerful data visualization tools in data space and it is also very easy to learn and use. In this article, we will demonstrate one of our works on Tableau and we are going to use FIFA 19 Complete Player Dataset which I found it on Kaggle. I also shared dataset’s link within the following section.

Diving into FIFA 19 Complete Player Dataset!

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Now, you remember our scenario from the intro part of this article, right? We need a striker for our team! This is very important because we want to score mor against our rivals in the games. Also remember that, we have a very big budget, so we don’t have to worry about the money :).

Before going any further, you can find the related dataset via this link and work on your own analysis!

Ok, moving on… One of the most important things in FIFA is that you need to get to know players’ skills. Of course, you can do this by examining their skill values. For example, if you want a good striker in your squad, then you need to check the “Finishing” skill in players’ profiles. The higher the value in Finishing, the more goals can the player score in games. That is why you want such a player like this in your team.

Moreover, finishing skill cannot be the only skill while searching for a striker, of course! There should be other important attributes as well, so that the player we want can make a bigger impact in our games. So according this, I specified six attributes including finishing skills for our search in the dataset. Here is the list;

Contract Valid Until

Age

Finishing

Shot Power

Dribbling

Ball Control

Of course, the number of the attributes can be increased according to needs but I found enough by six attributes for my case. Here you can also ask;

Why don’t we use the position filter? Aren’t we searching for a striker?

I think that having a position filter in our search can cause us to miss good attacking midfielders :). Moreover, not only good attacking midfielders but we can also miss other potential scorers playing in different positions! So, I don’t want to make that kind of mistake! :)

After selecting our attributes, we should give their ranges, so that we can see the filtered results. Here you can see how I can set the range values for them;

Contract Valid Until between 2018 and 2021

Age between 22 and 29

Finishing between 80 and 95

Shot Power between 80 and 95

Dribbling between 80 and 97

Ball Control between 80 and 96

Besides setting these attributes as filters, I use player’s value attribute for my x-axis (row) and overall (skill) attribute for my y-axis (column).

Have I Found the Striker for My Team? The Results

Having and setting all these, now we are getting our result finally! Here is what I got as a result;

Result Graph on Tableau

On the graph, you can also see additional information which shows filtered player’s position and finishing attributes. Now it is the decision time!

I already made my decision. So, what is yours?

There is also a good feature in Tableau that you can use additional information like in my graph and that is called “Marks”. For example, as you can see from the below image, I also used some same attributes in Marks section.

Tableau’s Marks Section

To give you an example, to make names colourful, I dragged name attribute to Color area in the section. You probably guessed the rest about how it is done. You can also find this Tableau graph in my Tableau public profile. Here is the link.

Conclusion

To sum up, Tableau is a powerful tool in order to tell your audience about your story. You can easily visualize your data in different kinds of graphs. Tableau offers lots of different options when it comes to visualization. So, I used it in this work and find my striker for my team! :)

Note: You can also check this blog post and some other interesting topics on my personal web page. Additionally, you can also find me in LinkedIn via this link.

Next: Can I Form A Dream Team in FIFA 19 using SQL? SQL Is Powerful but Is It Powerful Enough for This Important Job?