Google Search Graph of Footballers around Euro 2016 Captains

This graph shows the connections of footballers based on Google searches performed June 20, 2016 during the UEFA Euro 2016 tournament.

The captains of the 24 teams that participate in the Euro 2016 served as seed values for searches, namely: Hugo Lloris, Vlad Chiricheș, Lorik Cana, Stephan Lichtsteiner, Wayne Rooney, Roman Shirokov, Ashley Williams, Martin Škrtel, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Anatoliy Tymoshchuk, Robert Lewandowski, Steven Davis, Iker Casillas, Tomáš Rosický, Arda Turan, Darijo Srna, Eden Hazard, Gianluigi Buffon, Robbie Keane, Zlatan Ibrahimović, Cristiano Ronaldo, Aron Gunnarsson, Christian Fuchs, Balázs Dzsudzsák.

From these players up to 5 "People also search for" searches were performed and so forth up to the 3rd level of crawl depth. These related searches from the connections between the footballer nodes.

To be included in the graph a person's search result page on Google needed to have knowledge graph information indicating the person being a current or former football player or manager.

Graph observations

Some interesting observations from looking at this graph are:

Lionel Messi is the largest node, the one with the highest in-degree, even though Messi was not part of the original seed values.

Footballers from Russia and Ukraine, Hungary and Romania form communities that are disconnected from the main component.

Russia and Ukraine are connected by a single link between Anatoliy Tymoshchuk and Andrey Arshavin.

Several communities, indicated by different colors, map pretty well to national teams.

The purple community in the center around Messi, Ronaldo, Bale and Rakitić mainly consists of players from FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

José Mourinho is the manager who showed up most frequently as a related search in this network.

Graph information and prints

This directed graph consists of 278 nodes and 1012 edges. The size of a node corresponds to its in-degree, i. e. the number of times a footballer was shown in the related searches section. The number of footballers linked to in that section corresponds to a node's out-degree and can be 5 at the most.

18 communities were detected based on modularity optimization. They are indicated by the different colors. The layout results from a combination of Force Atlas and Label Adjust algorithms.

The graph visualization was created in Gephi and is rendered with Sigma.js.