FIFA 2018 World Cup Pass Heatmap

• Racheal Dylewski
• COSC 594 Lab 2 Jgraph
• September 28, 2021

Heatmap is a tool that creates a density map of passes made in a given match of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Given 2 teams, the program will create a JPEG heatmap of where the passes occured on the field. The program can visualize passes between both teams over the entire game, as well as for a particular player provided by the user.

---

Set Up

Heatmap relies on several outside projects to make its magic possible and uses curl to download zip files for data and dependancies. To set up, run

sh setup.sh

To build, run

make

To build and generate 5 beautiful images, run

make run

Usage

Heatmap takes 3 command line arguments: ./heatmap HOME_TEAM AWAY_TEAM PLAYER_CHOICE(Y/N)

HOME_TEAM is the home team AWAY_TEAM is the away team PLAYER_CHOICE is a simple 'y' or 'n'. If the user provides 'n', then the program will generate a heatmap based on all players passes for both teams. If 'y' is provided, then the program will provide the starting lineups for the teams, and will prompt the user for the exact name of a player. The program will generate the heatmap based only on passes completed by the specified player.

Requirements & Input Reference

Home team and away team must be capitalized and in specific order. A list of all games in the competition can be found in matches.txt. The program takes country spellings exactly as they appear in the file. Player input must be spelled exactly as it appears on program output. If there are accents or special character in a player's name, it is recommended to copy & paste.

All JPEG images will be sent to the folder output_graphs once generated.

Examples

Here are some interesting examples of Heatmap at work.

---

Croatia vs England, Luka Modric - Midfielder (Croatia)

./heatmap Croatia England y

Input: Luka Modrić

---

Spain vs Morocco, Munir Mohamedi - Goalkeeper (Spain)

./heatmap Spain Morocco y

Input: Munir Mohand Mohamedi

---

Brazil vs Mexico, Neymar Jr. - Forward (Brazil)

./heatmap Brazil Mexico y

Input: Neymar da Silva Santos Junior

---

Morocco vs Iran (All Players)

./heatmap Morocco "Iran, Islamic Republic of"

---

Dependancies

• nlohmann/json
• StatsBomb Open Data
• Dr. Plank's Jgraph