“I know that I know nothing” is probably the best piece of wisdom I’ve heard since I joined  Nordeus. It turned out to be true on many occasions.

It was Top Eleven’s 5th birthday. A big milestone for the game, so we wanted to mark it with an appropriate piece of content. Since our focus at the time was on strengthening and growing the community, it was an obvious choice to create something that would cater to this goal. In cases like this, the best option is always to start thinking in advance. This gives you enough time to go through a bunch of ideas, see if they are still relevant after a few days, then pick the ones with potential and kill the least promising ones. When we started thinking about 5th birthday we were already late, which didn’t leave us much of a creative space. Especially having in mind production time and all other promotional efforts. But, we gave it a try to see what we could achieve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vnpAKYohZg (embed)

We came to an idea to use what our community gave to us, shape and re-pack that, and then give it back to them. What could it be? Well, tons of data! At that moment Top Eleven was played by more than 100m players worldwide, and Data Science has always been a strong resource at the company. So we decided to play on that – visualize that data into an interesting video showcasing the variety of game-related info.

With the help of our analytics team, we extracted a bunch of juicy, football-related tidbits from the game and compared that data geographically. How many league matches were played in France, against how many in Spain or Germany? What percentage of USA Top Eleven players play attacking style compared to Canada and Mexico? How many games without bookings were played in Thailand in comparison to Malaysia? How does the Netherlands stack-up when it comes to triple crown winners compared to the UK or Belgium? Who plays the most attacking in South America, or who played the most matches in Balkans?