World Cup History

with SAS Visual Analytics
Project Background

2022 is the year of the next Soccer World Cup, taking place in controversial Qatar. Let’s take that occasion as an incentive to dig into the World Cup’s History!

Objective

Use data from the previous World Cups (1930-2018) to get some insights into possible trends for the World Cup 2022.

Questions
  1. Which were the hosting countries in World Cup’s history?
  2. How did certain metrics in the World Cup evolve?
  3. Which teams are leading over the last years?
Data

Access database here

Skills
  • Filtering, cleaning, summarizing data
  • Selecting variables for visualization
Tools
  • Excel
  • SAS Visual Analytics
  • SAS Data Studio
Which were the hosting countries in World Cup's History?

Most of the countries hosted the World Cup once. Exceptions are the following countries, that hosted twice: Mexico (1970 & 1986), Italy (1934 & 1990), Germany (1974 & 2006), France (1938 & 1998), and Brazil (1950 & 2014).

How did various metrics evolve between 1930 and 1918?

Both, the number of attendees and the number of participating teams increased drastically. From 590.549 in 1930 to 3.031.768 in 2018 the number of attendees increased by factor 5.  In 1930 only 13 teams took part in the World Cup; today 32 countries are represented.

Corresponding to the increase in the number of attendees and participating teams the played matches and scored goals also increased immensely. In 2018 171 were scored (compared to 70 in 1930).

Which are the leading teams over the history of the World Cup?

What are characteristics of a winner team? Brazil is the most common winner representing 22.73 % (5 of 22) in the World Cup’s history; followed by Italy and Germany (4 Titles each).

Conclusions & Recommendations

It’s impossible to predict soccer, they say, so I won’t try to predict the winner of this year’s World Cup. You now have some insights into the World Cup Data to draw your own conclusions.