Visualize the World Cup: 15 charts to power your football coverage
From fixtures to player stats, build interactive football visuals for every stage of the tournament
From fixtures and group tables to player stats and match results, football tournaments produce an endless stream of data. With the FIFA World Cup 2026 on the horizon, you need clear, flexible ways to visualize that information. The right charts make it easier to explain what’s happening on the pitch and help your audience follow every stage of the tournament.
Whether you’re tracking fixtures, following teams through the knockout stages, or analyzing player performance, use these 15 interactive football charts to visualize the tournament with clarity.
Jump to:
- The tournament essentials
- Squad guides, profiles, and formations
- The proper deep dive
- For the kicks: interactive quizzes
The tournament essentials
No tournament coverage is complete without these essential chart types. Whether you’re short on time or simply aiming to wow your audience, rest assured – our Flourish templates will take your reporting to the next level! Explore graphs that are both highly customizable and easy to make, such as the Tournament chart, Table, and Bar Chart Race.
Visualize fixtures with Tournament bracket charts and tables
Our interactive Tournament template provides a clear and simple way to map out the knockout stages of any tournament. Perfect for featuring on your homepage, this visualization type lets your readers easily track their favorite event’s unfolding story.
With the Tournament template, you can:
Visualize any stage of the tournament, from the round of 32 to the final
Add an extra column for the winner of each game, or leave it empty for future matches; the template clearly indicates fixtures yet to be played
Enhance your chart with custom visuals such as flags or player photos, a background image for added depth, and custom colors that match your brand
Turn fixtures into a searchable, color-coded schedule
If you’re looking for a neat way to lay out all upcoming matches, a table could just be the ticket. While our Tournament template captures the competitive flow from match to match, a table layout offers a straightforward snapshot of who plays against whom, where, and when.
The Table template is designed with versatility in mind, allowing you to:
Format and color-code cells to your preference
Add a search bar to quickly find information about specific teams or venues
Add images, emojis, or flags to make the visual presentation more engaging
As with all Flourish templates, the Table is very flexible – you can stick to the basics or include additional details like scores, making it as rich in information as you need.
If you want your fixtures to feel more visual than a standard spreadsheet, the Table template supports color-coded cells, so you can turn match listings into a clean, scannable schedule. You can color individual cells to highlight key matches, teams, or time slots, or use conditional formatting across an entire row or column (for example, by group, venue, kickoff time, or match status).
This added styling flexibility also makes it possible to build calendar-style layouts and even heatmap-style tables that help patterns stand out at a glance.
And for those who love going the extra mile with their data, you’ll appreciate a standout feature of our tables – the mini bar and line charts! They effortlessly turn your numbers into engaging graphs right within the table cells.
If you’re subscribed to one of our premium plans, you can link your visualizations directly to a live-updating CSV file. This means your charts will automatically refresh and republish as your data changes, ensuring your visuals are always current. The live data feature is incredibly handy for keeping charts updated in real-time scenarios, like tracking the progress of a game. Check out our blog post to learn more.
See the World Cup from every angle: venues, winners, rankings
Using one of our interactive map templates, you can share a detailed look at the history of tournaments or point out the locations of upcoming events, along with key game facts.
Use customized popups as in the example below to share more information about each point or region, without overcrowding your map. From adding rich text, custom HTML and CSS, vibrant videos and images, to even embedding Flourish charts, popups are ideal for interactive World Cup data visualization.
Hover over any host city to see photos of each venue:
Curious to see which nations have climbed to the top of the world in football? Our interactive Sankey Diagram lays out the tally of World Cup wins, giving a clear picture of each country’s success over the years. It’s an intuitive way to compare countries’ historical performance and make long-running rivalries and dynasties easy to grasp.
And if animation is what you’re after, our Bar Chart Race template is the perfect match for your needs. It’s perfect for visualizing how teams move over time, like shifts in FIFA rankings, qualification performance, or changes across tournament cycles.
To get started with a Bar Chart Race, your data should have:
A row for each participant
A column for each time period, and should be cumulative – i.e. it should reflect the total FIFA ranking points accumulated by each team up to that date.
You can also add images or flags and timed captions
For a step-by-step guide on setting up your data for a flawless Bar Chart Race, take a look at our help doc.
World Cup player data: squad guides, profiles, and formations
If you’re covering a tournament, you’ll need a clear way to present squads, lineups, and player stats. As you build your World Cup data visualization, player profiles and lineups help your audience quickly understand who’s on the pitch, what roles they play, and how teams set up for each match.
With Flourish templates like Cards and Sports, you can turn player data into interactive visuals that are easy to publish and update throughout the tournament.
Show players info at a glance with interactive visualizations
Our versatile Cards template is perfect for visualizing team and player profiles, plus extra context. With the Cards template, you can:
Build interactive player and team profiles with rich supporting details
Add popups, panels, and filters so readers can explore without clutter
Customize the design with HTML and CSS, including a hover effect
Create expandable content with collapsible sections
Design more playful interactions using flippable cards
Visualize formations and tactics with the Sports template
To gain a deeper understanding of every football match, you can use our Sports template which turns the complex world of team formations and tactics into vibrant, animated stories. It’s particularly useful for World Cup match previews and recaps – whether you’re showing a starting XI, highlighting a tactical change, or breaking down a key moment in the game.
In our template chooser, you’ll find multiple starting points of this template – from full to a half pitch, to a lineup with flags, images or numbers, explore the versatility of this template yourself below.
To accommodate unexpected formations, our Sports template allows you to plot each player individually. Simply provide an X and Y position in your dataset or use the custom formation box in the Preview tab. Read more about this on our help page.
Break down player stats with sunburst and bar charts
The Hierarchy template helps you break down World Cup player data into clear, clickable categories – ideal for exploring club affiliations, leagues, confederations, and player pipelines at a glance.
With the added functionality of filters and clickable segments, you can easily navigate through the sunburst diagram to learn more about the players’ club affiliations. Give it a go!
Besides the sunburst layout, the Hierarchy template offers a variety of other formats including treemaps, radial trees, packed circles, and stacked bar charts. All these options are readily accessible in our template chooser, but you can also easily experiment with different views right within the visualization editor. Read more about this chart type here.
One of Flourish’s standout features is the effortless creation of a grid of charts (also called small multiples) directly in the visualization editor. Instead of switching between separate charts, you can place multiple views side by side and compare them instantly – perfect for football data visualization, where patterns only become obvious when you look across teams, groups, or matches.
For tournament reporting, small multiples are especially useful when you want to:
Compare player stats across squads
Scan group-stage trends at a glance
Spot outliers (like unusually high shots, possession, or xG) across teams
Show the same metric for every team using different scales
Because every chart in the grid follows the same format, your audience can read and compare the data much faster – making this a strong technique for World Cup data visualization and match analysis.
Advanced football charts
Some stories need more than fixtures and final scores. For those who revel in the complex layers of football data, we’ve put together some visualizations that are a great match for any sports outlet or publication. These insights provide a deeper understanding of player efficiency, team dynamics, and tactical effectiveness.
Compare xG and goals with a scatter plot
One of the clearest ways to turn match analytics into a story is to compare expected goals vs actual goals. In the example below, we use a scatter plot to show whether teams at the 2022 World Cup finished above or below expectation (measured as goals scored per 90 minutes).
To make the key takeaways easy to spot, we used story annotations and replaced text labels with flags (attached as images) to reduce visual clutter.
The result is a chart that helps readers quickly spot over-performers and under-performers – ideal for match reports, previews, and post-game analysis throughout the tournament.
As both the examples above and below show, scatter plots bring a special kind of clarity to sports data. They allow your data to speak for itself, offering insights that might be less apparent with other chart types. Whether you’re opting for axis highlights or annotations, selective labeling or coordinating colors for clarity, the Scatter plot template becomes an essential tool for unpacking the layers of football tournament data.
The same versatility applies to our Sports template, which is excellent for mapping out intricate football tactics with animated trail lines. This feature serves as a powerful tool for visualizing anything from Spain’s 2010 World Cup-winning strategies to a local team’s season-long development.
Read our help doc to learn how to animate player movement.
In the example above, we created an interactive scrollytelling piece, incorporating various setups of trail lines. This is an effective way to guide the viewer through a narrative, highlighting key moments and strategic shifts that define a team’s journey.
Flourish’s scrollytelling feature allows for an engaging, story-driven exploration of data, making complex tactical analysis not only accessible but also visually impactful. For a deeper dive into this feature, check out our blog post.
For the kicks: interactive quizzes
Wrapping up this guide, here are two quick ways to add a playful layer to your World Cup 2026 coverage and keep readers on the page longer. Use interactive formats like a Quiz or a Draw The Line chart to test predictions, spark debate, and collect fan opinions throughout the tournament.
The Quiz template is ideal for quickly putting together interactive, enjoyable quizzes.
Choose between a slider or multiple choice
Customize feedback for each answer
Add multimedia elements (images, GIFs) for an extra layer of fun
Read our help doc for more.
Test football knowledge with a Draw The Line chart
The Draw The Line chart is a simple way to test how well your readers know the tournament. Ask them to draw the trend they expect based on the question—then reveal the real answer to see how close they were.
Your turn to take the pitch! ⚽️
We hope these visualizations fuel your creativity and inspire you to craft your own standout pieces. For a deeper dive into sports data magic, check out our webinar on World Cup visualizations or browse our blog for insights on visualizing football league data.
