Starting a project from the beginning of most cases involves creating your own set of data to answer your questions.
So, I would like to start answering some questions about … soccer football, firstly because I really like the game, secondly because as a true fan I enjoy discovering numbers and dates and finally even when there are tons of information about football in most cases you need to develop your own data sets.
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Question: Who were the top goal scorers in Argentina football team?
One of the most wonderful soccer player that Argentina ever had was Gabriel Omar Batistuta and he turns 50 a few days ago. If you don’t have any idea about him, let me introduce him in this way:
“Batistuta was Argentina’s all-time leading goalscorer with 54 goals in 77 official matches,[a] a record he held until 21 June 2016, when he was surpassed by Lionel Messi.[7] He participated in three FIFA World Cups, scoring 10 goals, making him Argentina’s all-time top scorer in the competition”.
But .. who were the others top scorers for Argentina national team? And for how many years each one maintained the records? Is so extraordinary the reign of Batistuta or are others equally valuable as goal scorers?
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The top scorer and his stats
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Conclusions
- Batistuta is still the owner of the record in quantity of goals
- Stabile maintained the record for 64 years, so if Batistuta wants to surpass to Stabile needs to be the top goal scorer for the next 32 years.
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Technical considerations
There is no table with the simple information so I checked on
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How is the process to create a dataset?
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Basically the process is answering logic questions to complete a table. No magic, just boring google searching and copy & paste.
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1. Since which year Argentina participated in World Cups? Was it be able to participate in all the editions?
Argentina participated in World Cups since the first edition (Uruguay – 1930), but was eliminated in 1950, 1954 and 1960 editions. Also in 1942 and 1946 there was no World Cup because WWII.
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2. Which the top scorers were along the time?
That was the tedious but easy thing to solve: in 1930 Guillermo Stábile scored 8 goals along the tournament, so the question to answer for each edition was:
- Who was the top scorer during the edition in question? Was the quantity equal or major than 8? No. So, did the player participate in other Cups? Yes or No. Yes? Did he score new goals?
- The answer was no for a lot of tournament until 1994 when someone called Diego Armando Maradona achieved a total of 8 goals – 1982 (2) and 1986(5) and 1994(1) – shared the title as the top scorer with Guillermo Stabile.
- Other player bounce into the scene: Gabriel Omar Batistuta with 4 goals in 1994, 5 goals in 1998 and 1 goal in 2002 become in the top scorer until now.
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3. How is my dataset?
| Year for World Cup | Top Goal scorer | Total goals | Total Goals by player | Top scorer for Argentina in each World Cup |
| 1930 | Stabile | 8 | 8 | Guillermo Stabile |
| 1934 | Stabile | 8 | 1 | Ernesto Belis | Alberto Galateo |
| 1938 | Stabile | 8 | 0 | |
| 1942 | Stabile | 8 | 0 | |
| 1946 | Stabile | 8 | 0 | |
| 1950 | Stabile | 8 | 0 | |
| 1954 | Stabile | 8 | 0 | |
| 1958 | Stabile | 8 | 3 | Omar Orestes Corbatta |
| 1962 | Stabile | 8 | 1 | Hector Facundo |
| 1966 | Stabile | 8 | 3 | Luis Artime |
| 1970 | Stabile | 8 | 0 | |
| 1974 | Stabile | 8 | 3 | Rene Houseman |
| 1978 | Stabile | 8 | 6 | Mario Kempes |
| 1982 | Stabile | 8 | 2 | Diego Maradona | Daniel Bertoni |
| 1986 | Stabile | 8 | 5 | Diego Maradona |
| 1990 | Stabile | 8 | 2 | Claudio Paul Caniggia |
| 1998 | Batistuta | 9 | 5 | Gabriel Batistuta |
| 2002 | Batistuta | 9 | 0 | |
| 2006 | Batistuta | 9 | 3 | Hernan Crespo | Maxi Rodriguez |
| 2010 | Batistuta | 9 | 4 | Gonzalo Higuain |
| 2014 | Batistuta | 9 | 4 | Lionel Messi |
| 2018 | Batistuta | 9 | 2 | Sergio Aguero |
| 1994 | Stabile / Maradona | 8 | 4 | Gabriel Batistuta |
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Conclusion
- This is an easy exercise to create a new dataset and answer a question.
- In this case, a good way to leverage this post is considering to use a library like plot.ly because we can add dynamism to the visualization.
