A 2nd, better way to WorldCupGraph

Hours after publishing my previous blogpost about the WorldCup Graph, I actually found a better, and more up to date dataset that contained all the data of the actual squads that are going to play in the actual World Cup in Qatar. I found it on this wikipedia page, which lists all the tables with the actual squads, some player details, coaches etc. as they were announced on 10th/11th of November.

So: I figured it would be nice to revisit the WorldcupGraph, and show a simpler and faster way to achieve the results of the previous exercise. So: I have actually put this data in this spreadsheet, and then downloaded a .csv version:

• one .csv file containing the squads
• one .csv file containing the tournament schedule (just like in the previous example, actually)

These two files are super nice and simple, and therefore we can actually use the Neo4j Data Importer toolset to import these really easily.

No WorldCup without a WorldCupGraph!

Last week I was having a conversation with one of my dear Neo4j colleagues, and we were talking about the fact that Graphs are simply so much fun to play around with, and that there's nothing like a great interesting dataset to have people really experiment and acquaint themselves with the technology. I know that to be extremely true, and I think I have demonstrated this elaborately over the years on this runaway blog of mine.

Then the conversation turned to a topic that I know very little about: the FIFA World Cup in Qatar that is starting next week. Now, reading this blog you may know that I am a little addicated to my 2 wheeled #mentalhealthmachine, and that chasing a ball across a field seems like a little bit of a game to me - but hey, that's ok! And with this conversation it actually dawned on me that at Neo4j, we had done "Worldcup Graphs" both in 2014 and in 2018: our friend and former colleague Mark Needham was the driving force behind both of those efforts.

You can still see some of the work that Mark did at the time on Github and Medium. It was truly another example of how a cool and timely dataset would get people to explore the wonderful world of graphs and get to know the technology in a fun and interesting way.

So: I decide that it would be nice to do that again. With all the new tech that is coming out of Neo4j with the release of Neo4j 5, that could not be very difficult, right? Let's take a look.