Wednesday 26 June 2019

Women's World Cup Quarterfinals

We are now down to the last 8 teams, and I swear the schedule for the Women's World Cup is shorter than the men's because we've barely had time to breathe.

I've realised there was a question I meant to ask in the last post and didn't. Does anyone know why so many of the Nigerian team played in the Norwegian league? Are they all following in a player's footsteps (a la the Fijian rugby league players of Rochdale)? Or is it something else?

While the second round results have mostly gone to form (except Japan vs the Netherlands), I am starting to think Brazil enjoy making the Argentine men's team look good at this knock out football thing. How can you be so good and still not win stuff?!

On to the diagrams:
  Network diagram showing the links between the quarter final teams 

The national team closest to the centre is England, and Manchester City are probably the club team closest but it's hard to tell because of the way the teams are spread. The losses of Canada, Australia and Japan mean that the US is pretty much on it's own with a heavy counterweight of European teams.

The club teams with the most players left in are Lyon (11), Bayern (10) and Chelsea (9). Barcelona lost most of its players when Spain lost.

The community view is less interesting because all the countries are their own community.Same image as before, coloured by community 

There seems to be far less overlap than there normally is in the men's game and I don't know if that's because no "dominant" league has yet established itself. In the men's you'd expect most of the finalists to play in one of the big 5 European leagues (Spain, England, Italy, Germany, France, and you can make the argument it's really a big 2 of Spain and England), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Yet. Professional leagues still being a relatively recent thing in women's football.

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