The need for entertainment in man dates back to prehistoric time, over time the love for entertainment has evolved from a mere need to occupy one's time, but a need to test strength, agility, and much more the need for competition, which has been redefined in Sports. Sports have long been a feature of human play and the game of football as we know it today has been a fixture of life for societies worldwide since the 19th century. Football is without a doubt the most popular sport in the world, and events such as the World Cup, which are viewed by hundreds of millions of people, are testimony to that fact. Its simplicity binds people regardless of social strata,or economic status, it it's no surprise that the sport has travelled the globe with the worldwide recognition and anticipation for the FIFA world cup games.

This project seeks to understand worldwide acceptance of football by analysing the matches that has been held in the FIFA World Cup, the countries these matches were hosted, countries who won the matches, and the top goal scorer in the past millennium.

Data Analysis Data mining and Scraping: The Live dataset for the FIFA world cup from the years 1930 till date was extracted and culled from Wikipedia and FoxAfrica Websites respectively. Each link from both sites were copied in order and pasted in the web box of Power BI, connections on the web resulted in a number of tables popping up, the relevant tables for the analysis was selected. Then transformed the data into power query on Power BI.

Data Cleaning :

1. Removed unwanted rows and columns 2 Renamed Columns
2. Replaced Values to fit the data to be analyzed
3. Split the game Column by Delimeter to split them into different colums, to differentiate the game and stages
4. Inserted missing characters in the table
5. Used the Append query to merge two tables into one After successfully completing the above transformation steps, loaded the data into Power BI.

Visualization 1.The winners of World cup Matches from 1930 till date was visualized using the Tree map visuals.

1. The Top 5 countries by goals was visualized using the Bar Chart.
2. The hosts of the World Cup Matches by Continents was visualized using a heatmap
3. The total attendance by the years, matches and goals were visualised using a Table
4. The average attendance by the Top 5 Stadium was visualized using the Bar chart.
5. The Highest attendance by the Top five matches was visualized using the bar chart
6. Q&A was used to show the name of the overall highest goal scorer.

Below is the link to our dashboard photos.app.goo.gl/76nYmiXPmXhb1MSj9

CONCLUSION:

Of the tournaments that have held, Brazil has won the most, winning 5 tournaments.followed by Italy and Germany who won 4 each, then Argentina, Uruguay and France who won 2 each and then England and spain, ten England and Spain who won 1 each making a total of 21 tournaments. Interestingly, these countries are from either Europe or South America.

In a bar chart, we showed 5 countries that have scored most of the goals in the tournements. It is quite interesting but not out of place that these countries where among those that have won the cup so far with the highest number of goals from Brazil, then Germany, Argentina, Italy, and France.

It is notable that the player that scored the highest number of goals so far, Miroslav Klose, with a total of 16 goals, is from one of these top countries, Germany, who has won the tournement 4 times.

Using the heatmap, we showed the continents that have hosted the world cup. The cup has been hosted majorly in Europe (9), then South America (5), North America (4), Asia (2), and Africa (1). The highest record of attendance held in 1994 with about 3.57 million attendees.

The stadiums with the highest average attendance was shown in a bar chart with Maracana stadium in the then-capital of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, having the higest attendance. It is notable that the match held on 16 July 1950, in Maracana stadium also has the highest attendance so far where Brazil lost to Uruguay.

With the cup holding in Qatar, Asia this year, we are eager to see who emerges the winner, and curious of the tournament would also come from Europe or South America.