The Significant Game

Let's start with the obvious: Cristiano Ronaldo has scored his fair share of free kicks over the course of his career. The way he takes his free kicks with his signature, cowboy like stance is ridiculed by many but makes him one of the most prolific and feared free kick takers. (I always thought that standardizing your run-up to a free kick is a smart idea). Possibly the pressure that rests on him and also his own motivation to be the best makes him try every chance he gets. Since Ronaldo plays in La Liga, no other player has attempted as many direct free kicks: 292. Right behind him is, of course, Lionel Messi with 232. After them there is a large gap with Pedro Leon (110) and Daniel Parejo (102) following. To highlight the monopoly Ronaldo has on free kicks in the Real Madrid team, it is worth looking at other players' tally. Following Ronaldo we have Gareth Bale with 35 attempts and Mesut Ozil with 17. Since Ronaldo arrived at Real Madrid he has taken 71% of their dire...

I have recently started to play around with gganimate to create some animated graphs based on the ggplot framework. This allows you to include another dimension in your chart, e.g. a time dimension for a scatter plot and save them as gifs. You can see some cool examples on the gganimate github page which I linked before. I had some complication with installing devtools which is necessary to install gganimate through github. I think I only had these problem because I am running R/RStudio in the Anaconda environment. When trying to install devtools through install.packages("devtools") I got the below error: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0-ar: no such file or directory make: *** [libmygit.a] error 1 error: compilation failed for package ‘git2r’ devtools requires git2r to be installed as a dependency but somehow this failed for my R environment. The solution to my problem was to install git2r beforehand through Anaconda directly by running the following line in the ...

The stadiums of the German Bundesliga are often romanticized because of low ticket prices and large stands. In another aspect they are more commercial than in any other European league: 14 out of 18 clubs have sold the naming rights for their stadium. This compares to only 8 in the Premier League and only 3 in Serie A and La Liga. The data was taken from this year's UEFA club licensing report.