Women's World Cup 2023 - Group Stage Network Diagrams

Slightly late, but really, who starts a World Cup on a Thursday!!! 

Making these charts revealed some interesting things: 

1 - All teams have at least 1 player playing in their home league except Canada. I'm not sure if that's because the US league is both so strong and right next door. 

2 - All teams have at least one player playing abroad. 

3 - Adding more teams has made the diagram much messier. 

4 - A remarkable number of Zambia's players (4/23) play in the Kazakh league. Also, I found out there was a Kazakh league. This shouldn't have surprised me. 

5 - There are Saudi Arabian women's teams. That really did surprise me. 

What does the diagram look like?  

The club teams with the most representatives are Barcelona, with 17, Chelsea, with 16 and Paris Saint-Germain with 14. 

Looking at the community view, there are 32 teams but 24 communities. The communities are as follows: 

1 - Vietnam 

2 - Zambia 

3 - Philippines 

4 - Argentina and Brazil 

5 - Panama and Costa Rica 

6 - China 

7 - Colombia 

8 - Portugal and Nigeria 

9 - New Zealand 

10 - South Africa 

11 - Haiti 

12 - Jamaica and Canada 

13 - United States 

14 - South Korea 

15 - Spain 

16 - Ireland 

17 - Morocco 

18 - Switzerland 

19 - France and Netherlands 

20 - Australia, Sweden and England 

21 - Japan 

22 - Denmark and Norway 

23 - Italy 

24 - Germany 

It's actually really hard to tell where the centre of the diagram. Obviously, there's the physical centre, which would be Brazil or New Zealand in terms of national teams and Pachuca for the club teams, but the weight of the teams is concentrated in the bottom, where Sweden, Norway and Denmark make a really heavy cluster. That also makes it hard to make predictions (as L requires). 

The following are my predictions from this diagram, with the caveat that it was really hard to distinguish the centre of the diagram. 

Group A - Philippines and New Zealand out, but closer than expected (I said this before the NZ vs Norway game and have witnesses to me saying it. Multiple witnesses. I should also apologise to Norway for drawing them in my work sweepstakes.) 

Group B - Nigeria and Ireland out 

Group C - Zambia and Costa Rica out 

Group D - China and Haiti out 

Group E - Portual and Vietnam out 

 Group F - Brazil and Panama out, but that sounds weird to my ears 

Group G - South Africa and Argentina are out, but see previous statement 

Group H - Morocco and Colombia out