Today’s dashboard day gave us a simple prompt: take the dataset from our most recent applicants’ final interview (which was data based on World Cup matches) and show how much we’ve improved by building our own take on it. I landed on the question of how global the World Cup really is. The idea was a simple one to try and provide a more high level view of how nations participate in the World Cup. However, I quickly ran into my first challenge with the fact that Tableau had no way of knowing which country belonged to which continent. As such, I used generative ai to help build a calculated field mapping countries to continents, though a few nations like Angola and Chinese Taipei didn’t match cleanly and needed to be added in by hand. Another issue came up once I tried building visuals around teams, since home and away were sitting in separate columns I was unable to get the granular count I was after. I fixed that in Tableau Prep by splitting the main table into two (home and away), renaming the team and score fields so they’d line up, then unioning them back together into one usable team-level table. This became the core of my build as it allowed me to present the analysis I was after.
From there I ran into a subtler problem: since a country can appear multiple times across a tournament, a plain count wasn’t giving me an accurate read on unique participation. I solved that by creating a combined field of team plus year to get a true unique count per country per tournament. I also built out a decade field for filtering and a win count(country equals winner, then 1) to support the matches won chart. The final dashboard has three filters (tournament type, stage, decade) and five charts: a bump chart ranking continents by total participation, a map highlighting participating countries, and three bar charts covering participants by continent, matches won by continent, and times hosted by continent. My analysis showed that while the World Cup is still not a fully global experience, it is steadily becoming one.
Overall, I was happy with the work I was able to produce within the allotted time. While not perfect, I was able to truly build off the skills I've developed over my time here at The Information Lab.