How to Visualize Soccer Data Using Mplsoccer in Python

Football analytics for everyone.

Photo by Thomas Serer on Unsplash

Introduction

Football Analytics has become a trend in recent years. Many football clubs are starting to recruit data scientists to be part of their teams. Even BBC created a headline that data experts are the best signings in football [1].

Because of the high demands and exposures, people are starting to get into football analytics. There are lots of open-source tools and data that can be used for getting started in this field. Mplsoccer is one of the tools for creating visualizations of football data [2].

In this article, I will show you how to implement those visualizations by using libraries like mplsoccer and matplotlib. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Implementation

About the library

Mplsoccer is a Python-based library for visualizing soccer charts. Visualizing soccer data in Python is not straightforward as visualizing a scatter plot or a histogram.

Thanks to this library, we can present any soccer charts based on the available data. Some visualizations that we can create using mplsoccer are radar charts, heatmaps, shot maps, and many more, and this library helps you generate the…