Data Visualization for the 2014 World Cup results using Excel and Power BI

This blog post was authored by Marc Reguera, Finance Director, Microsoft

After the success and interested generated by my first post, Visualizing the World Cup history with Excel and Power BI, I decided to update the model with data from the 2014 Brazil World Cup and analyze how the history of the world cup changed based on the results. The concept was exactly the same: use Power Query to get the latest data into Excel, update the Power Pivot model and visualize with Excel dashboards using Power View to analyze 2014 data vs. historic data from previous world cups. I used the same visualizations to unlock insights on how team performance changed, how the attendance stacks up vs. previous tournaments and other interesting facts around goals, goal average and number of games. So let’s dig in! remember: all of these dashboards were created with Excel, tapping into online data with Power Query and updating the model that I created.

Here are eleven brand new insights I learned after exploring the updated world cup data using Excel interactive dashboards and Power BI features:

1. Brazil 2014 was the world cup with most goals scored, matching France 1998 and breaking the trend since then of decreasing goals per game and reaching 2.67 goals per game
2. Attendance was great to, being only beaten by USA 1994 (because of the US massive stadium average size) and almost hitting the 3.5 million mark for all 64 games
3. Brazil is now one of the countries that hosted most world cup games, with 85 being only surpassed by Germany with 102 games
4. The average goals per game increase is explained by the percentage of games with 3 goals, which exploded from 22% in 2010 to 31% in 2014. The increase in goals with 4 or more games (9% in 2010 vs. 13% in 2014) also contributed
5. Regarding team historic performance based on the model I created (+1 win, 0 tie and -1 loss and goal difference), I found the following trends:
   1. Germany got closer to Brazil, who before 2014 was the clear leader
   2. Since Argentina made it to final, now they are very close to third place catching up with Italy which had an awful world cup, being eliminated in the first round
   3. On the middle tier of team (based on number of games played since the beginning of the world cup) the biggest improvement is for Chile
   4. Finally, for the teams that go as often to the world cup, Costa Rica and Colombia improved dramatically based on their great performance in Brazil 2014
6. Germany has had an exceptional performance on the last 4 world cups, making the top 4 on all of them and winning the last one
7. Germany-Argentina is now the most common final game in the history of world cups
8. Netherlands is the team with most top 4 finished without winning a single world cup.

Just like last time, here’s a live demo of the model for you to play around that includes all the data from the 2014 World Cup.

Thanks for reading / watching and I can’t wait to see you all again for the 2018 World Cup!