English Football’s Guide to the European Game
2 years ago
September 21, 2010
reblogged via 
2 years ago
September 3, 2010
The 2010 World Cup: a Global Conversation
To highlight how much Twitter has been pulsing with World Cup activity over the past month, our analytics and relevance teams put together the infographic above, charting fans’ use of hashflags (like #esp or #usa) during the tournament with a background of TPS over the same period.
• When you look at this graphic, think of it like a soundwave — the louder and more consistent the “sound,” the bigger the impact in all directions.
• Countries’ flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag “waves” fluctuate with the frequency & consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag.
» via The Twitter Blog
2 years ago
July 16, 2010
reblogged via 
2 years ago
July 11, 2010
![Polder Football -
With Polder Cup, [Maider] López will be playfully combining the Dutch love of football, water and consensus culture. In the polders near Ottoland in the Province of South Holland, she will paint football pitches on the surrounding pastureland. Ditches will cut right across the pitches forcing players to come up with new rules and new tactics. The Polder Cup is set to rejuvenate international footballing language. As López explained, the rules of football are in part determined by the shape of the pitch. If you change that shape, the rules are automatically changed along with the game of football as we know it. It will become a new game. The players will have to come up with new tactics, thereby reinventing the sport of football.
via The Pop-Up City](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l51qtu4Zvv1qzf03eo1_400.jpg)
Polder Football -
With Polder Cup, [Maider] López will be playfully combining the Dutch love of football, water and consensus culture. In the polders near Ottoland in the Province of South Holland, she will paint football pitches on the surrounding pastureland. Ditches will cut right across the pitches forcing players to come up with new rules and new tactics. The Polder Cup is set to rejuvenate international footballing language. As López explained, the rules of football are in part determined by the shape of the pitch. If you change that shape, the rules are automatically changed along with the game of football as we know it. It will become a new game. The players will have to come up with new tactics, thereby reinventing the sport of football.
via The Pop-Up City
2 years ago
July 4, 2010
2 years ago
June 29, 2010
Where do the 736 Players from WC 2010 work?
interactive viewer showing where world cup players play when not playing for the national teams
2 years ago
June 21, 2010
Reina, our analog director, explains to Kevin why women watch the world cup.
After my very assertive comment, Kevin quickly sent me a message asking if there was proof that backed up my statement.
Of course, there was none.
But as an avid doodler, I created the proof myself.
Why Women Watch the World Cup
- National pride
- Nothing else on TV
- Bonding time with significant other
- Loves/plays/enjoys the game
And, the most obvious reason why women watch the World Cup
- Sexy Algerian men and their butts
Note: Research done under 2 minutes. Only the opinion of one woman was taken into account. This woman, though, is a butt connoisseur.
2 years ago
June 18, 2010
reblogged via 
Goooal! Scientists Score in Ranking Soccer Stars
Unlike baseball and American football, the world’s most popular sport doesn’t produce many stats. Only a handful of soccer ranking systems exist, most of which rely on limited information: the number of goals scored in a match, the number of goals assisted, and some indices of a match’s difficulty and importance. Although such systems are meant to assess which teams and players are the best, their focus on scores alone limits their accuracy, says Luís Amaral, a complex-systems engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “You end up with no information on anyone but the player who made the goal and the player who assisted.” An avid soccer fan, Amaral wanted to measure team and player performance in a way that takes into account the complex interactions within the team and each player’s contribution. So he turned to an unlikely source: social networks. Applying the kinds of mathematical techniques used to map Facebook friends and other networks, Amaral and colleagues created software that can trace the ball’s flow from player to player. As the program follows the ball, it assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal. Whether the shot succeeds doesn’t matter. “There’s lots of luck involved in actually getting it in,” Amaral explains. Only the ball’s flow toward the goal and each player’s role in getting it there factors into the program’s point system, which then calculates a skill index for each team and player. When the researchers used the program to analyze data from the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship, the indices closely matched the tournament’s outcome and the overall consensus of sports reporters, coaches, and other experts who weighed in on the performances. The results appear online today in PLoS ONE. “One of the issues with any kind of teamwork is assigning the right credit,” says Amaral. “The wild, loud people get more credit, but with this analysis you can get a picture of how much an individual really contributes to an outcome.”
via ScienceNOW
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