Animated Football Heat Maps

Over the last couple of years player heatmaps have become a very popular data visualization method for showing the influence of individual soccer players over the course of the ninety minutes of a soccer game. These static heatmaps tend to be used to show the areas of the pitch where an individual player has been most active during a soccer match.

This CartoDB Referee Map shows an animated heatmap of one soccer referee's movements during a soccer game. The map uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate the referee's heat map over the ninety minutes of the match. If you adjust the timeline to the beginning of the game you can see the full GPS track of the referee over the ninety minutes without the heatmap layer.

The map provides a neat demonstration of how CartoDB's Torque library could be used to animate an individual soccer player's movements during one game. Unfortunately it might be difficult to get hold of the data for a player's movements during a professional match. European soccer leagues tend to have contracts with sports data companies (such as Opta) who then charge exorbitant rates to use the data from professional soccer games.