How to create Football Pitches/Goals as Backgrounds in Tableau

Analysing football data provides an excellent opportunity to use visual cues such as football pitch and goal frame outlines to help communicate visual analysis. 2D Football pitches have been popularised across media culture as a method of visualising tactics, pass networks, goals & lineups. These include newspaper & online journalism, video games such as Football Manager and Television broadcasters who are now using increasingly sophisticated tools to recreate passages of play for viewers.

These visualisations work because the creator and audience share the same frame of reference. Football pitches and goal outlines don’t need any further explanation; they are so ingrained in the way viewers consume football that they make a perfect starting point for adding extra layers of analysis.

This blog will focus on how to create Football Pitch outlines in Tableau. The exact same technique applies to getting the a goal frame behind your data. In essence, the pitch and goal templates are images that are plotted as a background behind the data. Check out this page for Tableau’s own write up on background images.

Before we start, here’s what you’ll need:

• Pitch/Goal Template (Download a sample from my website here).
• Data including X & Y coordinates…