I’ve taken a bit of time recently to write a simple parser in Python which can read in the Wikipedia format in which rugby match results are presented, which has allowed me to attempt to do some analysis on the data. There’s plenty of information there, but this is a nice, and visually appealing summary of the data. It shows the (aggregate home and away) scores of every team as won off every other team in the Pro 12 (the domestic professional league in Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) in the 2014/15 season. For example, a chord from Glasgow to Connacht is scaled to show the total number of points Glasgow won off Connacht at the Glasgow end, and vice versa at the Connacht end (if we’re being technical, it’s a representation of the directed graph of the league results… fun.)

There’s a lot more data still to go through, but I thought this was a pretty nice picture. It’s made with d3, a nice little javascript toolkit for data visualisation. There are a few other teething problems, such as deciding what colours each team should have in the chart (everyone seems to play in blue or red, leading to Cardiff Blues getting… pink [their 2nd shirt colour]).

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