The task for week three of the SideHustle Bootcamp had us analyzing every FIFA World Cup tournament played between 1930 and 2022 using Microsoft Power BI for visualization. The FIFA World Cup is considered to be football’s biggest prize which holds every four years, hence it is a well-documented event. Getting the dataset for this task was quite easy and we sourced it from Kaggle’s database.

Cleaning The Data

The dataset was sourced in excel format and contained three sheets; the first contained the FIFA ranking of all countries as of 6 October 2022. The second contained details of all matches played in all tournaments played between 1930 and 2022, listing the top scorers in each tournament, number of goals per match, attendance, etc. The third sheet had information on the outcome of every tournament.

Upon loading the data onto Power BI, we went ahead to clean it with Power Query using the following steps;

• Checked for duplicates

• Checked for blank cells

• Removed irrelevant columns

• Checked and changed data types of various columns

Visualizing The Data

We visualized the data and looked out for the following information;

1. The number of title-winning teams

2. Average attendance per stadium

3. Total and average attendance per tournament

4. Matches with the highest average attendance

5. Total goals per tournament

6. Stadiums with the highest attendance and goals scored

7. Number of goals by world cup winning teams

8. Number of teams and number of goals per tournament

9. Number of goals and matches per home and away team

Findings

• 22 world cup tournaments have been played at four-year intervals since 1930.

• Brazil is the most successful country in world cup history having won the tournament a total of 5 times followed by Germany which has won the tournament 4 times (2 times as West Germany and 2 as Germany).

• A total of 44,048,413 people have attended the world cup since its inception in 1930.

• The 1994 world cup holds the record as the most attended world cup tournament. It was attended by 3,587,538 people.

• In the first world cup in 1930, 13 teams (countries) qualified for the tournament while successive tournaments between 1934 and 1978 had 16 teams vying for football's biggest prize except for the 1950 tournament in Brazil which had 15 teams. In 1982, the number of competing teams increased to 24 and from the 1998 world cup to date, 32 teams entered the world cup per year, making it a total of 492 teams that have played in the FIFA world cup since its start.

• A total of 2,720 goals have been scored since the beginning of the FIFA world cup.

• 172 goals were scored in the 2022 world cup which broke the standing record of the most goals scored during the world cup previously held by the 2014 tournament (171 goals).

• Argentina with 18 goals has the highest number of goals by a World Cup-winning team, followed closely by Brazil (16 goals).

• The majority of the games were won by the home team.

• From 1998 to the present, 64 matches are played per world cup tournament.

• The most attended match in world cup history is Brazil vs Uruguay match in 1950, which was the decisive match of the tournament.

• The Maracana Stadium in Brazil is the stadium with the highest attendance during a world cup tournament.

World Cup Analysis Dashboard