World Cup Qualifying Graphic

England are going to the Next World Cup.

That's good news for us Englishmen. It is good to have qualified early - good to avoid the stress of playoffs (always used to be against Poland it seemed).

The victory stirred my general WC2010 interest. Who were we going to play? Who would we need to beat? But also who is having the kind of trouble we used to have? Which 'fancied teams' are giving their fans a rough run-in? 

The sports-media had these kind of details in text and the odd table on view - but I felt something was missing. It turns out there are quite a few big teams that are having difficulty but no way of working out the scale of this upset - or if the 'mighty' were indeed falling.

So I thought of an idea for a graphic (the basic idea of which could fit any media). 

The Story Idea is "are big teams having difficulty qualifying for the word cup?"

To do this, the graphic would need to show two main variables in it's search for a correlation - Strength Of Team and Qualifying Status.

Here it is (sketch form only) - Big version here or click image below

The best way to show the strength of team was the Fifa rankings (true to 12.9.09) of the top 32 teams in the world - those that should be in with the best chance of qualifying.

Qualifying status was then marked with colours.

Green for Qualified

Yellow for In qualifying position - by playoffs potentially

Red for not in qualifying position

Then it got tricky. It isn't just a question of securing a qualifying position.

In UEFA countries, unless you are top of your table, you need to be in the higher-points qualifiers to get into playoffs - so even 2nd place in a table isn't a guarantee. So I was left with a quandry - Either keep the yellow for this overall place rating with the inherent complexity of each teams position shielded - of use more colours - to describe the different states.

I felt that too many colours would render all the colours less useful. So I added secondary colour marks in the yellow bars.

Green circle  • - Top of group

Red circle  • - In playoff position for CONCACAF vs SAmerica.

With hindsight, I don't think I need the red dot. I was obsessing about how amazing it is that a team like Argentina wouldn't qualify. Reading about Maradona and considering the pressure that the whole team was under made me park my better judgement - that bar should have been just yellow - they were in the qualifying place (currently a play off against El Salvador - so we'll probably be seeing them in South Africa).

South America qualifying table

Other notes -

- The right of the page would have provided a place for more detailed display of the tables and relevant data callouts - I've only got a few, thinking to just select the relevant tables/ data stories.

But maybe one should show them all - using the colours in the main chart as highlights and guiding points to the key stories in the complexity. By presenting All Tables, the reader would soon be aware of the complexity - and having read such tables before - would go about it in their own time.

- I would illustrate this page with two photos - one player (probably English) celebrating and one player probably Ronaldo) looking annoyed.

Come on England.

Comments

[Ciaran Hughes]

There's an interesting side bar graphic in this subject, namely the struggle within FIFA to limit the power of Europe and to promote Africa and Asia for political reasons. If you compare the populations, league wealth, TV revenue and attendances of European nations to that of the other regions, Europe is handicapped in it's representation at World Cups - it's harder to qualify