The European Cup Final Map

Last week I was impressed by the Twitter FA Cup Final 2014 map. This CartoDB Torque powered map visualized the global Twitter mentions for the two competing teams before, during and after the English FA Cup Final. We now have an even better animated Twitter map of the European Cup final between Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid.

Essentially the Real Madrid v Atlético Madrid: #UCL final map follows the same approach as the FA Cup Final map. It provides an animated heat map of Tweets made around the world mentioning either of the two teams, during the 120 minutes of the game. However the addition of a simple time-line helps to make this map far more engaging than the FA Cup Final map.

The time-line running along the bottom of the map highlights key moments during the game (goals, yellow cards & substitutions). This helps to contextualize the results shown on the map. Scroll the time-line to '21:26' and you can see that the explosion of red on the map was caused by Atlético Madrid's opening goal. Similarly if you scroll the time-line to '22:38' you can see that Real Madrid's equalizer resulted in a huge explosion of Tweets mentioning the team.

The Real Madrid v Atlético Madrid: #UCL final map is a great demonstration of CartoDB's Torque library. It shows how an animated map coupled with a simple time-line can provide a very powerful tool for exploring very large data sets over time.