World Cup Player Heights

Distributions of height by position for each player in the 2018 FIFA World Cup
graph by John W. Miller; slow reveal by Aristotle Ou
originally published February 27, 2020.

Type of Graph: box and whisker plot

Purpose

This slow reveal is designed to support analysis and discussion of both the data and the design choices. The questions in the slide deck invite learners to consider statistical measures like mean, interpret a histogram, examine trends, estimate values, discuss measures of center and measures of spread, and make connections.

Aristotle created this slow reveal graph to launch an eighth grade lesson from the CPM  math curriculum.
CC3 CPM Lesson 7.1.2 Is There a Relationship?

Type of Graph: box plot

About This Graph

This visualization is not provided for reuse or redistribution. Readers and educators are encouraged to view the original visualization in its published context.

Original Visualization:
John W. Miller (Reddit user ‘textureflow’ on the Data is Beautiful subreddit)

Data Sources:
scraped World Cup soccer data from the SportRadar API. Used Python and matplotlib. Here is the code.

The middle line indicates the median of the team’s height distribution. The edges of the boxes extend to the first and third quartiles of the data. The whiskers extend to show the range of the data, excluding any extreme outliers.

Here are the distributions of height for each nation in the World Cup.

Here is an interactive version of this plot on John W. Miller’s blog.

Potential Math Content: box plot, box and whisker plot, interquartile range, median, percentile, quartiles, maximum, minimum, 5 number summary

Potential Content Connections: soccer, football, world cup, sports, health, heights,