Sports - an overview
What is it for?
Do you need to quickly fire up a visualization of players' positions on a football field, basketball court, or any other kind of sports pitch? With the Sports template, you can create different kinds of line up visualizations quickly but with a host of options offering a high level of customization as well.
How to get started
1
Choose the
Line up starting point from the template chooser page and
upload your player data to the template.
In our example, the positions are filled from bottom to top – the first row being the goalkeeper, then the defenders, and so on (we'll need to bear this in mind later when we set the
Start position).
2
Next, set your column bindings. These will vary depending on the type of sport and what data you have available. For our example, we just have player names which we set to the
Info binding and player images which we set to
Photo.
Follow this help doc for some tips on
how to upload images into the datasheet.

3
Since the positions in our example are not determined by the datasheet, we opted for
Default formations in the
Players settings. Through the
Start formation setting you can switch between different modes of how the positions should be plotted.
Here, we've used the
Bottom start formation as the first row in our data is the goalkeeper (to be positioned at the bottom of the visualization) and the last row in our data is the striker (to be positioned at the top).

4
Under the
Formation options, you can choose between the set of typical formations.

5
If the options available don't meet your needs, you can specify one yourself. Head to
Formation type and choose
Custom. Now set out your own formation using an asterisk
*
for every player, a dash
-
to leave empty spaces on the field, and a new line for the next level of the formation.
TIP: If the formation does not look right, try changing the Start formation. You may be setting a custom Formation type but remember that the template plots it the other way around when Start formation is set to Bottom.
6
You can customize the pitch through the
Pitch settings. Here you can change the
background color,
aspect ratio (the ratio of its width to height), and alter the
offset and
margins.

7
Need to change to a different pitch type? Still under the
Pitch settings, head over to
Lines and use the
Type dropdown to select football pitch, half-pitch, basketball pitch, or using
Custom, you can upload your own file or input the code for a custom SVG.

8
In the next section, you are able to customize the appearance of the
dots – that's the circles that show the player images.
As well as changing the
label size and
color, there are bold or normal options with the
Weight setting, and you can increase or decrease the space between the dot and the label with the
Label vertical offset option.

9
Though the
Dots options, you can customize the size and color of the dots and their borders.

10
You are able to alter the images included in the dots by enabling
Image Style, and opting for custom
Contrast,
Brightness and
Saturation.
Additionally, using
Blend mode you can choose between different presets.

Get started with your own Sports visualization now! »