World Cup Qatar 2022 Passing Networks by Marc Soares

In addition to the many superlatives that have been used to describe the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup, it also produced more data than any football tournament ever before.

Every touch, pass, cross, shot, save, goal, and a wealth of other data points were recorded and catalogued by FIFA in real time. This data was surfaced through in-game insights and published in summary reports for every match.

When reviewing the post-match reports, I was drawn to the "passing network" tables that show the number of passes completed between each pair of players. While difficult to read in a tabular format, it was the perfect opportunity for visualization.

The many-to-many relationships of passing networks are a great use case for chord diagrams, in which each chord across the circle represents passes between a pair of players. These visualizations summarize the passing network of each team in the 2022 FIFA World Cup.