Map Time: Cities Hosting United States WNT Matches (2012 through March 2017)
As promised, here is the map--or rather, maps--of USWNT fixtures from 2012 through March 2017, based on US Soccer's own data. For reasons I do not understand, finding a complete world map on which one can plot data points using R is challenging. Indeed, it is apparently impossible to create a map of the entire world using get_googlemap. So I decided to create two maps, one of matches in the Americas and the other of matches outside of the Americas. This actually isn't all together a bad thing as it allows the continents to appear larger and spreads out the plot points more, making the data easier to appreciate.
Here are the two maps (click to enlarge):
It turns out that in the past 5-1/4 years, Vancouver (7 matches) has welcomed the USWNT more than any other city in the world. Curious that the "home" of the USWNT since January 2012 would be a city outside of the United States. There is also a tight cluster of matches in Portugal thanks to the Algarve Cup. The most frequent stops for the USWNT in the United States are Frisco, TX, and Chester, PA (5 matches each).
I was also surprised to see that US Soccer includes on its Results web page a result (0-0) for the USWNT v Trinidad & Tobago match that was cancelled because of concerns about the field. That doesn't make any sense to me, and even if FIFA regards this as an official result (which its website does not), I'm not going to include it on the map of USWNT matches because it was never played. Sorry (again), Hawaii.
I played around with adding labels to some of the data points on these maps using geom_text, but I didn't like the way it looked. Instead I opted to leave them "clean".
Of course, these maps will be obsolete as soon as tomorrow night, when the US women take on Russia in . . . Frisco, TX.
Here are the two maps (click to enlarge):
It turns out that in the past 5-1/4 years, Vancouver (7 matches) has welcomed the USWNT more than any other city in the world. Curious that the "home" of the USWNT since January 2012 would be a city outside of the United States. There is also a tight cluster of matches in Portugal thanks to the Algarve Cup. The most frequent stops for the USWNT in the United States are Frisco, TX, and Chester, PA (5 matches each).
I was also surprised to see that US Soccer includes on its Results web page a result (0-0) for the USWNT v Trinidad & Tobago match that was cancelled because of concerns about the field. That doesn't make any sense to me, and even if FIFA regards this as an official result (which its website does not), I'm not going to include it on the map of USWNT matches because it was never played. Sorry (again), Hawaii.
I played around with adding labels to some of the data points on these maps using geom_text, but I didn't like the way it looked. Instead I opted to leave them "clean".
Of course, these maps will be obsolete as soon as tomorrow night, when the US women take on Russia in . . . Frisco, TX.
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