January Transfer Window graphics in The Times

I never thought I’d talk about football this much, but here you go.

I spent the last weeks working on a rather massive piece looking at the January Transfer Window, this time of year where extraordinary sums are spent to convince men to come kick in a ball somewhere else.

Read the whole piece and the club-by-club analysis on The Times. Note: you can now register for free and benefit from two free articles.

Scatterplots

We elected to set the y-axis domain manually, so it would be identical for both charts. Fixing the y-axis (instead of running it from minimum to maximum) shows how the Oscar transfer to a Chinese club skews the analysis.

French midfielder Morgan Schneiderlin’s £24m fee seem little in comparison to Oscar’s £60m.

Snakey chart

Inspired by this WSJ piece about swing in US states, we decided to try to flip the coordinates of a rather standard line chart, so to display it vertically.

We decided to call them Snakey charts. And here’s an implementation of them in D3.js.

Oh, and that was also the first time the Times played with annotations. Unconvinced by the traditional bendy arrows, the designers asked us to go for straight lines, with a bubble at the top. Which apprently looks more Times-y.

(Apologies for the Times fonts being lost in the bl.ock…)

Treemaps

To illustrate where players were coming from as well as the positiong they occupy on the pitch, we produced a set of treemaps, complete with hover-click states, and a mobile view. I must say the Times colour palette produced decent looking results.