Okay, so I was messing around with some data related to the World Cup, specifically focusing on N’Golo Kanté, because, well, he’s a beast. I wanted to see if I could pull some interesting stats and maybe visualize them somehow. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of project.
First, I started by trying to find a good data source. You know, somewhere that had all the match data, player stats, and all that good stuff. It took a bit of digging, clicking around random websites, and generally feeling lost.
Data Hunting
- Tried a few sports data sites. Some were okay, some were a total mess.
- Found one that seemed promising, but I had to navigate through, like, a million menus. It wasn’t exactly user-friendly.
Eventually, I managed to get my hands on a dataset. It wasn’t perfect, but it had the basics – appearances, minutes played, tackles, interceptions… you get the idea. I downloaded it as a CSV file, because that’s usually the easiest to work with.
Wrangling the Data
Next up, I fired up my trusty Python environment. I usually use Pandas for this kind of stuff, it’s pretty good for handling tabular data. I loaded the CSV file into a Pandas DataFrame, and then the real fun began.
- Checked for missing values. You always gotta do that, you never know what you’re gonna find.
- Cleaned up some columns that had weird formatting. Sometimes data entry people are, shall we say, inconsistent.
- Filtered the data to just include Kanté’s World Cup stats. I didn’t want all the other noise.
This part took the longest, honestly. It’s always the way, isn’t it? You spend like 80% of your time just getting the data into a usable state.
Finally, some Results!
After all that cleaning and wrangling, I could finally start playing around with the data. I calculated some basic stuff, like his total tackles and interceptions per game. I even tried making a simple bar chart to visualize his performance across different matches. Nothing fancy, but it was cool to see it all laid out.
It was a bit of a messy process, but I learned a few things along the way. It definitely reminded me how important good data sources are, and how much time you can spend just cleaning things up. But hey, it was fun to mess around with some World Cup data, and Kanté is always an interesting player to focus on.