Alison Gale

Towards the end of the 2024 NWSL season it became clear that teams were clustered into different groups. This visualization used a utility I wrote that calculated the highest and lowest a team could finish. This showed that 1st and 5th were clinched so there were 3 teams fighting for 2nd place and then another set of teams fighting for the last few playoff spots.

In recent seasons, there have been many games scheduled during very hot periods of the day or year. Some cities like Houston or Orlando are hot year round while others like Seattle tend to be much cooler at kickoff. Temperature is calculated as the five-year average temperature at kickoff for each match.

With just a few weeks left in the season, the difficulty of remaining games will have a big impact on which teams make the playoffs. This highlights which teams are mostly playing higher or lower ranked teams. Variations were made to weight teams by points rather than rank.

Over the years, there have been games at over 30 stadiums. Some games were one-offs while one stadium (Providence Park) has hosted games for the entire history of the league. This shows some interesting statistics like the elevation of the stadium (Utah having the highest), stadium capacity, and average goals.

Summary of how many draft picks from 2024 were signed after the first ten games of the season and how many minutes those players have gotten. Most of the first round draft picks have gotten good minutes and all but five of the draft picks from the first three rounds have been signed. There have also been some standouts who were drafted late.

As the NWSL has continued to grow, more fans are close to a team. I wanted to visualize how teams are spread across the country and which areas are furthest from a team. While this doesn't take into account population density, it is interesting to see how Utah filled in a big gap in the center of the US.

The NWSL has been expanding much more quickly and will return to two markets that it had previously left. This visualization highlights how the league has grown over time and how each of the teams have performed. Shield, championship, and cup wins are highlighted for the winning teams.

As more players bypass college to enter the NWSL, the demographics of teams will start to skew younger. Interesting patterns can also be seen when comparing the demographics of teams over time to understand how the balance of youth and veterans impacts team performance.

For my first attempt at a data visualization quilt I embedded details about all 2023 NWSL games (regular season, Challenge Cup, and playoffs) into a quilt design. Each team is represented by a color and the relative sizes of the colors in each block represent which team won the game. The gray squares encode what type of game it was (regular season, playoffs, etc). Click through on the Twitter link to see the final quilt.

I wanted to visualize how tight the NWSL table was across different seasons. In 2023, there was very little separating the top and bottom teams which was very different from past seasons that had more separation between the top and bottom teams. The spirals show the cumulative point totals for each team across all the past seasons.

I explored how the USWNT load balanced minutes between players in past tournaments. I found that teams often don't rotate players much in the group stage and when they do it is often forced by card accumulation or in a situation where the team is not at risk of elimination.

See different possible outcomes for who will make the knockout stage from each group based on how the final matchday shakes out. In Group D there were some particularly fun outcomes with possible 3-way ties that would go down to fair play points. To simplify this chart, it only looks at results where a single team scores but it covers the most common outcomes.

See how all the 44 teams who have competed at the Women's World Cup have finished. With an expanded field of 32 teams, the 2023 tournament features 8 debutants. There have been 7 teams who have qualified for every year of the tournament so far. And the United States has been the most successful with 4 victories.

Half of the teams in their years Women's World Cup feature an NWSL player. The United States has teh most representation by far, but both Brazil and Canada have very good representation in the NWSL. The OL Reign and Washington Spirit both have the most players featured in the World Cup.

See how many minutes each pair of players on the USWNT roster have played together since the last Olympics in 2021. Darker lines indicate more shared minutes. You can see which players and combinations of players have a lot of experience together at the national team level. I also posted followups that highlighted only the lines from a single player to get a better view of who they have played with.

To commemorate Lauren Barnes being the first player to hit 200 regular season appearances I created a scrollable visualization to highlight her accomplishments. She has played over 17,000 minutes, helped earn three NWSL Shields, and she has been a longtime captain of the team. This visualization shows all the Reign games since 2013 and highlights different statistics as you scroll. Barnes has scored 2 goals and contributed to 58 shutouts.

This series of plots compares pairs of statistics for each team between two seasons. In this example, the points earned through the first ten matches are compared. This highlights how much the Washington Spirit have improved compared to last season and how fall the Chicago Red Stars have fallen.

The Racing Louisville v OL Reign game on April 29, 2023 marked the 1,000th regular season NWSL game. This was my first attempt at generative art, using data from all 1,000 matches. Teams are represented by ovals that are oriented and sized to represent goals scored and season performance. I also created zoomed in views of individual matches to highlight high-scoring results and the first ever NWSL match.

Refreshed my popular 2022 NWSL Standings bump chart to add more data about wins/losses and goals for/against. The left side shows how the standings have changed each week, while the right side shows the current season stats. The bump chart now has thinner lines between weeks so it is easier to see movement with overlapping lines. Used cubic splines for better looking curves between weeks.

I wanted to highlight fun build-up plays that lead to goals. This example shows the 5th goal from the Reign's 5-2 win over Chicago. The play began with Tullis-Joyce handling a tricky back pass. Huerta did a give-and-go with Sonnett before dribbling down field and passing to Balcer. Balcer sent in a cross to Fishlock who scored her second goal of the match.

I looked back at how teams differed in their substitution patterns in 2022. Some teams, like San Diego, started subbing early while other teams, like North Carolina, waited the longest before subbing. Angel City rarely used their fifth substitute while Houston almost always did.

Highlighted how far each seed has progressed for Women's March Madness tournaments going back to 1984. This interactive visual allows you to highlight a specific seed or team to see how performance has changed over time. 2023 was the first year since 2011 to not feature a #1 seed in the Championship. Built using d3.

The Portland Thorns became the first NWSL team to win 100 regular season matches. This visualization renders the results of all of Portland's regular season matches with Championship and shield winning seasons highlighted. The 2014 season saw many high scoring wins and losses while recent years have featured more consistent wins.

This visualization summarizes offseason player movement in the NWSL between the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Arrows denote movement between teams and into and out of the league. OL Reign retained the most players from 2022 while five teams retained only 17 players. Washington Spirit relied heavily on bringing in external players while teams like Gotham and Houston relied on transfers from other teams.

After many years of unsuccessful attempts to secure a backpacking permit for the Enchantments I wanted to explore the data from past lotteries to understand how to improve my odds. Sunday is the day with the best odds and the shoulder months also see a reduced number of applications.

The 2022 Washington Spirit had a notoriously difficult start to the season with little rest between games. This inspired me to start breaking down the schedule to see which teams have more balanced schedules. In 2023, Orlando and Angel City have 3 times as many pairs of games with 3-4 days rest compared to the Portland Thorns.

This heatmap provides a high level understanding of the distribution of games. It highlights that there will only be Challenge Cup games during the World Cup and after the World Cup there won't be any midweek games.

This breaks down how many minutes draft picks from different college conferences have played in 2022. Pac-12 players earned the most minutes, followed by the ACC. Racing Louisville relied most heavily on draft picks, while teams like Gotham barely played any draft picks.

This set of visualizations highlight how game scores for a team progressed throughout each game during a season. All matches start at 0-0 and then curve upwards as either team scores. OL Reign was almost never behind by two goals during the season and had lots of low scoring matches. The color indicates when goals were scored, so the game that ended 4-1 had several late goals.

I wanted to understand which partnerships in the NWSL led to the most goals. During the 2016-2022 window, Sam Kerr and Yuki Nagasato combined for the most goals, with Nagasato providing most of the assists. Notably, Trinity Rodman and Ashley Sanchez made this list despite joining the league much more recently than others on the list.

Built this website for exploring the teams and schedule for the 2023 Women's World Cup. This site features an interactive schedule that allows projecting the schedule based on team finish, a tool to plan an itinerary based on team preferences, and a map to visualize a team's path as they progress through the tournament.

The goal of these charts is to highlight streaks of teams performing well or poorly. The height of the line represents the average points gained from the previous 5 matches. OL Reign, North Carolina, and Kansas City all had very strong finishes to the season, while Gotham struggled towards the end.

2022 had a very tight race for the Golden Boot, but Alex Morgan led the race for most of the season. This highlights how goals were distributed over the course of 2022.

A bump chart was the perfect way to highlight the NWSL race for the shield. Kansas City's mid-season jump from 12th to 1st was impressive. And the last minute shuffling of the top 4 teams made for an exciting final few weeks..

There has been much discussion around whether to schedule the final games of the season at the same time. This shows how the standings would have changed through the course of the games if they had been played simultaneously.

This web app visualizes information about passes during the 2020 Men's Euros. Trained a pass completion likelihood model in Python and included that data alongside other key details for each pass. Visualized all passes within discrete time periods, including player locations, using d3.