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.