We wanted it to be both a guided tour through different categories of players based on their careers and an exploratory tool to search through the careers of thousands of footballers.

After analysing the data we could define two important groups of players: the ones changing many teams during their career and the ones spending most of their lives in a handful of teams. In these sets, we identified two important subsets: the Journeymen and the One-club men, the first are the ones changing a crazy amount of times their team, the latter are the ones playing for only one team in their career. We decided to focus the narrative of the main story on these two categories, extended with highlights on some of the greatest footballers ever (the Legends) and some interesting facts.

We spent a large amount of time collecting, cleaning, parsing, comparing, mixing and matching data from different sources. We now have a full set of tools to automate this process, however, at the very end, before going online we went manually through all the outliers to fix the unexpected visual effects.

We have built a database of more than 100,000 players from all over the world, covering the last century. We are planning to use the same data for different projects.