FM21: How to create a squad profile visualisation

After posting the above squad today via Twitter I have had a few enquiries from within the community in relation to how to create one. Given the fact that last nights FM ended up in me blowing the race for Champions League Qualification wide open, I thought tonight I would use tonight in creating a short step by step guide so to walk readers through the necessary steps to create what is a basic yet useful viz.

1.The raw data

without this you have nothing, now you could go old school and write up each player in your squad in excel and then input their minutes played and age in separate columns, however who has the time to do that when we all want to be playing FM?!

The easier method, simply customise the ‘General Info’ view by adding in ‘Minutes’ and bonjour you have the your data at the tip of you fingertips.

Next up, you want to copy all this data in order to transport it over to your spreadsheet software, my choice is either Excel or Google sheets.

To do this simply press CTRL+P at the same time and you will be presented with the screen below.

Save this as a Web Page to you documents, open up excel or sheets and import the saved file into a new spreadsheet as per below.

You should then be presented with the data from your FM save in a spreadsheet friendly format. Now to make things easier, simply delete all columns so that you only have the following three. (Player Name, Age & Minutes Played).

2. Tableau is the nuts

Next hit the following link Tableau to download the following software, trust me you will never look back at a shitty scatter plot create again!

Once you have it downloaded or open connect to either a file (excel) or to a server (Google sheets) to link to your data.

Now your data source is loaded into Tableau, click on ‘sheet 1’

3. Create that Viz!

Nearly there now folks, you will see your masterpiece start to take shape very quickly and then you can start to post your viz’s on twitter and make yourself look like the Don.

If you simple drag the ‘Age’ into the columns tab and ‘Mins’ into rows, swiftly followed by adding ‘Name’ under the marks section and count to three you will have a very basic viz.

4. Get your viz in order

So you now have your Viz but it isn’t looking as shiny as you’d like, lets face it you will be posting these to your blogs or onto social media so I don’t want to leave you pissing into the wind.

First up, click on the box next to name and select label, now your dots all have names next to them, making it easier to comprehend.

Secondly, you will need to sort you axis, simply right click on wither on to be presented with the option to ‘edit axis’

You will need to choose fixed and bring them values down to reflect the data, this will make everything snug.

Next quickly change the size of your dots by selecting size under the ‘marks’ section and slide the scale up.

Now to bang in some analytics, simply select the analytics tab and click on the average line, this can be dragged across to the minutes axis which pops up.

Next add two constant lines to the ‘Age’ axis with the set age of 24 and 29, this will highlight who in your squad are within their peak years, now to the left of that obviously are players who can be classified as youth and to the right your experienced members of the squad.

Now if you edit your title and colour and shape of your data, all of which can be done under the ‘marks’ tab you are pretty much there.

5. Adding an Image

If you want to be fancy and bang in an image save a png file of your teams logo and then click on the new dashboard button.

This is the second tiny button after sheets, here select your sheet and floating and drag and reposition onto the workspace, then select image and do the same again!

There you have it, your very own semi-decent looking data-viz!

How can the squad profile be used?

I would say this profile is an excellent tool to use at the end of each season, from it you can easily see what youth players are getting sufficient game time and are really adding value to your squad, along with which ones aren’t and could benefit from being sent out on loan to assess as to whether or not they are good enough to be involved in your plans.

Secondly, it will identify which players are integral to your plans…you should know this as these are the ones you will be selecting week in week out! However what this tool does is help you to assess which ones are fringe players and ones which may be approaching the end of their prime and could be offloaded.

Now clearly this viz doesn’t cover outputs so it isn’t your only resource, however in my humble opinion it is a great way to see things from a different perspective.

I hope you have enjoyed this post, please, please, please drop a RT as I am sure many of you will find this of use!