Who voted for who? Diving into Ballon d’Or voting data
Cristiano Ronaldo is officially the world’s best player for the second straight year, as he received the 2014 Ballon d’Or. In addition to knowing that Ronaldo won the award, what else could we learn from the voting detail released by FIFA?
First, let’s explain the rules
This award is based on votes from national team captains and coaches, as well as journalists from around the world. Each voter is allowed to select three players for the first, second and third places, whom will receive 5, 3 and 1 point respectively. The nominees are then ranked and awarded according to total points.
1. Ronaldo is clearly the winner
Ronaldo’s points are way more than other nominees and quite evenly distributed among the three voter categories.
2. Messi vs. Neuer
From the chart above, Messi and Neuer received comparable points. Let’s take a closer look.
The distribution is totally inverse for Messi and Neuer. Messi received most of his points from peer players (blue) and not so much from journalists (green) while Neuer received most of his points from journalists (green) and not so much from peers (blue). Both nominees received comparable votes from coaches.
Most of the votes Messi received was for the second place (orange). Neuer received more votes than Messi for the first place (blue).
Broken down by voter and position, the data reveal that only 4 journalists voted Messi for the first place, less than Thomas Müller (11). Neuer, on the other hand, received 31 votes, only second to Ronaldo.
3. Where are the voters?
The map below display the location of voters who voted each player for the first place. Ronaldo’s are everywhere. Messi’s are in South America. Neuer’s are in Europe.
There are probably many more things that could be extracted out of this dataset but I am running out of time so I am gonna stop here. If you want to play with the data yourself, feel free to grab it from here. I have already parsed FIFA’s pdf into Google spreadsheet.
Credits
The visualizations in this article was made by Tableau. I extracted the data from original PDF using PDF Tables and post-process with Data Wrangler. The extracted dataset can be found here.
