Welcome to Day 5 of Dashboard Week, athletes! Today, we are swapping out standard spreadsheets for high-octane racing stripes, stadium floodlights, and a stadium full of cheering minifigures. The LEGO universe is absolutely packed with sports, but how it treats athletic movement, competitive speed, and physical recreation is an epic story of product design.
Some sports get massive, multi-million dollar flagship stadiums, while others don't even get a dedicated theme box - instead, they exist as nameless, baseline athletes hidden away inside mystery blind bags.
Your Task:
You can choose from one of the 3 areas below (or your own, as long as its Sports related)
- Motorsports
- The fastest category in the LEGO catalog! Your first task is to isolate and analyse high-performance racing lines. Focus your SQL queries on dedicated themes like Speed Champions, Speed Racer, and motorsport-adjacent Technic supercars.
- The Stats Matchup: Track the complexity explosion of these sets over time. Are modern builds turning into highly intricate, high-part-count garage masterpieces compared to the simpler drag racers of the late 90s and 2000s?
- The Sponsor Liveries: Dig into the colours table - do motorsports sets rely on a structurally distinct colour profile (think stark blacks, vibrant team yellows, and corporate racing reds) compared to the rest of the database?
- Soccer / Football
- Time to hit the pitch! Isolate the dedicated, classic Soccer theme alongside massive modern standalone stadium sets (like Old Trafford or Camp Nou).
- The Tactical Shift: Soccer sets historically pioneered interactive, spring-loaded tabletop gameplay mechanics. Analyse how the part counts and set counts changed when LEGO shifted from these interactive "playable" pitches of the early 2000s to the massive, luxury display stadiums of the 2020s.
- Team Kits: Map out the dominant brick colors used in these sets to see if LEGO favors iconic, high-contrast primary colors for stadium builds and player kits.
- The Undefined Athletes - Minifigures
- Here is where you need to do some serious scouting. Major global sports like tennis, cycling, surfing, and gymnastics have never had their own dedicated, standalone box themes. Instead, these sports are populated by anonymous, nameless characters scattered across City, Friends, and Collectible Minifigures (CMF) blind bags.
- The Keyword Draft: Use robust pattern matching and regular expressions (
REGEXP_LIKE) in SQL to scour the database for these hidden competitors (e.g., searching for terms like "cyclist", "tennis player", "skater", "surfer", or "gymnast"). - The Rise of the Generic Competitor: Contrast these nameless, grassroots sports characters against the massive, officially licensed IP partnerships (like real-world F1 teams or the NBA). Which eras leaned heavily on real-world sports branding, and which eras let the generic, anonymous minifigures rule the stadium?
The Technical Requirements
- Download the Rebrickable CSVs and upload them individually to your own schema on Snowflake (feel free to add additional data if you can find it)
- Pipe your curated Snowflake views into a Tableau Dashboard. The final product should be an interactive, sleek, and highly scannable dashboard built for deep data exploration.
- Document your database schema, host your analytical SQL scripts, and publish your final visualisation links within a clean GitHub repository.
Final Whistle
The clock is ticking, the fans are in their seats, and the sports world moves fast. All code commitments, data pipelines, and dashboard deployments must be finalized and submitted by 3:30 PM. Leave it all on the field today, team-let's build an analysis that takes home the gold!