Try, try and try again: visualising the Six Nations

4 min readApr 12, 2019

Given the wealth of data about sport — I mean, important numbers are inherent to the whole concept of sport, really, aren’t they? — I’m constantly surprised that there aren’t more visualisations of sporting data, particularly in the UK.

We get some simple bar and pie charts in-game, or while they show the interviews on Match of the Day. We have the conventional table for the state of play in leagues and championships. And there are some exceptions, notably the excellent steppy graphs of John Burn-Murdoch at the FT (or 538’s exhaustive coverage of mainly American sport).

But there still aren’t as many good examples as we might expect. Fewer still actually tell the story of a particular game or match, rather than all-time statistics.

And there’s very little on rugby.

So I thought I’d play around with some very basic data on this year’s Six Nations a) in an attempt to see what could be done and b) revel in our glorious Grand Slam for a little while longer (as if I or three million other people really need any excuse). And when I say basic data, I mean basic data — more is obviously possible with player-level data and in-game stats, but I’ve stuck to points scored during matches and the final table.

Like the game itself, the below is a bit rough but hopefully gets closer to the line with successive phases.

Top of the table

Inspired by a couple of other attempts at reengineering the standard table, I tried one with some further visual cues to bring out the numbers — wins vs losses, heat maps for some other key stats…

…and then another spacing out the teams based on the points they’d accumulated (which probably loses some of the heat mapping effect). The colours are based on team shirts, and the colours of the title sponsor. (More on colours below.)

Wales remain top.

A box of matches

I could have sworn somebody — The Guardian, I think? — used step line charts to visualise the results at Rugby World Cup 2015, though I can’t find them. I’ve been using those a lot more than usual recently, and it seemed like the natural choice to tell the story of an individual match (and what an individual match it was, etc).

From this basic starting point, there are a number of tweaks one could make: more vertical lines, a break taking account of halves running on beyond 40 minutes, etc. One could also add labels, call-outs, descriptions, labels as events occur during the match.

As for colours... As with most sports, there are strong associations between Six Nations teams and their colours. One of the problems with England (insert your own punchline here) is that white doesn’t tend to work very well on a white background, leaving a few possibilities — namely grey standing in or red (from the St George’s cross). Emboldened by Aron, I stuck with white but on the black background of the title sponsor (which does then cause some thistly issues for the colour of Scotland). In retrospect, I think the filled small multiples — a technique we’ve used a fair bit down the years, borrowing from the FT — probably would have worked better.