English Premiership Transfers 2011 - The Data

Being a life-long Liverpool fan, I've been taking a lot of interest in this spring's transfer goings-on, so while reading the Guardian's datablog, I started to wonder to myself what the all the transfers that happened this weekend would look like if visualised.  In particular, how much money actually changes hands between Premiership clubs, and how much of it leaves the country to foreign clubs.  A very quick search turned up this useful, if horribly formatted dataset from the Telegraph's website.

A little find-replace later and I've got something a little nicer looking, in an Excel spreadsheet.  However, looking at the data now, I've got about 220 entries, most of which are loans between clubs, and don't really contribute to what I'm looking at, the money, so I cut these out.  This leaves me with 62 transfers between teams (including free transfers and those for undisclosed amounts) - a nice number, I think.

Next I decided to limit the details of the foreign clubs to their respective leagues, to make the cash flow easier to visualise.  This involved (manually!) searching for the name of each non-Premiership club and noting down the league.  Google's feature of telling you the latest result and next game for a football club really helped with this!

So now, with a little colouring and some further tweaking I'm left with a pretty good-looking spreadsheet.

Now for some visualisation.  This is the hard part, really, and I still haven't quite figured out how to do it.  My first attempt is just using a basic Omnigraffle "circles" layout, mostly because I don't really know what I'm doing with this program.

Click to embiggen!

So unfortunately that looks kind of lame, but I do like the interconnectedness of it all, and it's approaching what I was hoping it would like, so I'll keep working on it and try make it cooler.  I'm trying to think of somehow including the names of each transfer, with the thickness of connecting lines indicating the amount paid.

I've uploaded all the data to google docs anyway, so if anyone out there fancies making a cool infographic out of it, that'd be brilliant!