[OC] Who played with the most Ballon d'Or winners? I mapped every connection from the last 25 years Visualization

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC] Who played with the most Ballon d'Or winners? I mapped every connection from the last 25 years" and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on I built a dataset of 1,500 top-flight players for a football trivia game I'm working on (SHOBU11 if you're curious). The dataset includes full squad histories so I can tell exactly who played with who at club level. I figured it would be fun to map out Ballon d'Or connections.

There are 16 Ballon d'Or winners in the dataset. I cross-referenced every player's teammate history against those 16 and built a network graph. **Gold nodes are the 16 winners, silver nodes are the top 25 non-winners with the most connections to them**. Each line means they shared a squad.

Among the winners themselves, Kaká is the most connected with 7 fellow Ballon d'Or winners. Milan in the early 2000s plus Real Madrid after that he was at the crossroads of two golden eras. Ronaldo Nazário also sits at 7, same logic basically.

Then there's Rodri at 0. **The only Ballon d'Or winner in the dataset who never shared a dressing room with another one**. Make of that what you will., which allows us to understand complex relationships and insights within the data through visual storytelling.

Deep Dive into the Topic

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