Football Financial Radars
Formidable Cool
Like many fans, I have found football radars to be really helpful when assessing the relative qualities of individual players, as they are visually very intuitive and easy to understand at a glance.
Therefore, I have long wanted to produce something similar to highlight the financial strengths and weaknesses of football clubs to investors, but have been defeated by various technical limitations (mainly my own).
Until now.
In an attempt to prove that an old dog can learn new tricks, I have now taught myself just enough computer code to produce a half decent Football Financial Radar.
These guys rock
That said, I am very much indebted to the guidance and help provided by a few friends and colleagues.
The excellent Scott Willis of Cannon Stats was the original inspiration for the football slice design that I favoured for the radar. Scott gave me many coding tips and patiently answered a lengthy series of dumb questions. You can find Scott here .
Here’s an example of his handiwork, which just happens to be for Bukayo Saka.
Scott also pointed me towards the mplsoccer website, which was extremely useful in the financial radar’s original design. It’s a great resource for people who want to learn something about coding, but don’t want to go full computer nerd (URL)
At the beginning of this project, I also called on the services of the brilliant Financial Times data visualisation guru, John Burn-Murdoch, who has consistently raised the bar in this field and was kind enough to share some of his expertise (URL)
Last, but not least, one of my friends, who wishes to remain anonymous, did some fantastic work in improving my basic efforts. In truth, he substantially rewrote the code, so that the program is now a lot smoother and actually does what I want it to do. An absolute rock star.
Radar Example
Enough preamble, here’s an example of the Football Financial Radars for Manchester United in the 2023/24 season.
Basically, the more that a slice is filled out, the better the club ranks against its peers.
Graphs for the remaining 19 clubs in the Premier League are available to the top tier of subscribers after the paywall.
In the following section of this article I will also explain:
Why we have selected the metrics that are used in the radar
How the data is calculated for each slice in the radar