Analyze Euro Cup Table Data with Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

For passionate football enthusiasts eager to delve into the history of the UEFA European Championship, Power BI Desktop offers a powerful way to visualize decades of “Euro Cup Table” data. Imagine transforming raw data into compelling stories, revealing trends and insights about Euro Cup winners throughout the years. This tutorial will guide you through importing Euro Cup results from a webpage, shaping this data within Power BI, and creating insightful visualizations. By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped to analyze “euro cup table” information effectively, enhancing your understanding of this prestigious tournament.

Connecting to Web Data for Your Euro Cup Table

To start building your “euro cup table” analysis, you’ll first need to connect Power BI Desktop to a web data source. A rich source of historical Euro Cup data is the UEFA European Football Championship Wikipedia page, specifically the Results table found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_European_Football_Championship. This page contains comprehensive “euro cup table” information, including winners and tournament details.

Note: Web connections in Power BI utilize basic authentication. Websites with advanced authentication might not be compatible with the Web connector.

Follow these steps to import the “euro cup table” data:

Navigate to the Home tab in Power BI Desktop’s ribbon. Click the dropdown arrow next to Get data, and select Web.

Alternatively, you can select the Get data icon directly or choose Get data from other sources on the Power BI Desktop Home screen. Then, find and select Web under the All or Other categories in the Get Data dialog, and click Connect.
In the From Web dialog box, paste the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_European_Football_Championship into the URL field. Click OK.

Power BI Desktop will then connect to the Wikipedia page. The Navigator dialog will appear, displaying a list of tables available on the webpage. You can preview the data of each table by selecting its name. For our “euro cup table” analysis, Table 3 contains the desired information, although it requires some refinement.

Important: The Preview pane shows only the currently selected table, but upon choosing Transform Data or Load, all selected tables will be loaded into the Power Query Editor.
Select Table 3 from the Navigator list and click Transform Data.

The Power Query Editor will launch, displaying a preview of the “euro cup table” data. Here, you can begin shaping and cleaning the data to prepare it for visualization.

Refining Your Euro Cup Table Data in Power Query Editor

For a clear and focused “euro cup table” report, we want to display only the tournament years and the winning countries. Power Query Editor provides the tools to shape and cleanse your data efficiently.

First, let’s remove unnecessary columns, keeping only the columns relevant to our “euro cup table” analysis. We will later rename one of the remaining columns to “CountryRegion”.

In the Power Query Editor grid, select the columns you want to keep. Use Ctrl to select multiple columns.
Right-click and choose Remove Other Columns, or go to the Home tab in the ribbon, find the Manage Columns group, select Remove Columns, and then Remove Other Columns. This will delete all columns except the ones you selected.

or

The second row of the imported “euro cup table” data contains irrelevant values. Let’s filter the Final column to exclude the “Winners” entry.

Click the filter dropdown arrow in the Final column header.
In the dropdown menu, scroll down, uncheck the box next to the Winners option, and click OK.

This action filters out the row containing “Winners” and the corresponding null value in the adjacent column, cleaning up your “euro cup table” data.
Similarly, filter out 2028 and 2032 from the year column, as these tournaments are in the future and don’t have results in our historical “euro cup table”.

To improve readability and clarity for our “euro cup table”, rename the second column to CountryRegion.

To rename, either double-click the second column header, or:
- Right-click the column header and select Rename, or
- Select the column, then in the Transform tab of the ribbon, find the Any Column group and select Rename.
or
Type CountryRegion in the header and press Enter to confirm the renaming.

Next, filter out rows with null values in the CountryRegion column from our “euro cup table”. You can use the filter menu as before, or:

Right-click on a cell in a row that contains null. Since both columns in the unwanted rows contain null, you can right-click on a cell in either column.
Select Text Filters > Does not Equal from the context menu to remove all rows containing that null value.

Lastly, the imported “euro cup table” data has a superscript note marker [c] appended to the year 2020. To ensure data accuracy for our “euro cup table”, we need to address this. You can either remove the marker or, based on the note’s information, correct the year to 2021, as the tournament was held then. Let’s correct the year.

Select the first column.
Right-click and select Replace Values, or find Replace Values in the Transform group under the Home tab, or in the Any Column group of the Transform tab in the ribbon.

or
In the Replace Values dialog, type 2020[c] in the Value To Find field, enter 2021 in the Replace With field, and click OK to apply the change in your “euro cup table” data.

Loading Your Euro Cup Table Query into Power BI Report View

With the “euro cup table” data shaped and cleaned to your specifications, it’s time to name your query and load it into the Power BI Desktop Report view.

In the Queries pane, locate the Name field and enter Euro Cup Winners.
Click Close & Apply > Close & Apply from the Home tab in the ribbon.

The query will now load into the Power BI Desktop Report view. You can find your “Euro Cup Winners” data listed in the Data pane, ready for visualization and analysis.

Tip: To revisit and edit your query in Power Query Editor, you can:

Click the More options ellipsis (…) next to Euro Cup Winners in the Fields pane, and select Edit query, or
Select Transform data in the Queries group on the Home ribbon tab in Report view.*

Visualizing Your Euro Cup Table Data

Now, let’s turn your “euro cup table” data into compelling visualizations.

Select the CountryRegion field from the Data pane or drag it onto the report canvas. Power BI Desktop intelligently recognizes this data as country/region names and automatically generates a Map visualization, displaying the locations of Euro Cup winning nations.
Resize the map by dragging the handles at the corners to ensure all winning country/region names are clearly visible.
Currently, the map shows uniform data points for each winning country/region in our “euro cup table”. To represent the number of wins for each country, drag the Year field to Add data fields here under Bubble size in the Visualizations pane. The field will automatically change to Count of Year, and the map will now dynamically resize data points, making countries with more wins appear larger.

Customizing Your Euro Cup Table Visualization

Power BI Desktop makes it incredibly easy to customize your visualizations, allowing you to present your “euro cup table” data in the most effective way.

Formatting the Map Visualization

To refine the appearance of your map, select the visualization and click the Format (paint brush) icon in the Visualizations pane. For instance, the “Germany” data points might be misleading in our “euro cup table” visualization, as West Germany won two titles and Germany one. The map overlays these points. Let’s differentiate them with color and enhance the title.

With the map selected, click the Format icon, then select Visual > Bubbles > Colors to expand color options.
Set Show all to On. Then, in the dropdown next to West Germany, choose a distinct color, like yellow, to differentiate it from Germany.
Select General > Title to adjust the title. In the Text field, replace the existing title with Euro Cup Winners.
Customize the title further by changing Text color to red, Size to 12, and Font to Segoe UI (Bold) for better visual impact in your “euro cup table” visualization.

Your formatted map visualization of the “euro cup table” data should now resemble this example:

Changing the Visualization Type for Your Euro Cup Table

Sometimes, a different visualization type can better represent your “euro cup table” data. For example, the map visualization might not accurately represent the Soviet Union’s wins as the country no longer exists on the map. A pie chart or treemap could offer a more comprehensive view of all winning entities.

To switch from the map to a pie chart, select the map and then click the Pie chart icon in the Visualizations pane.

Tips for Pie Chart Visualization:

Use Data colors formatting to match the colors for “Germany” and “West Germany” for consistency in your “euro cup table” representation.
To group countries with the most wins together in the pie chart, click the ellipsis (…) at the top right of the visualization, then select Sort axis and Count of Year. This will order the pie slices by the number of wins, making it easier to identify top-performing nations in the “euro cup table”.

Power BI Desktop provides a seamless and comprehensive experience, from importing and shaping data from diverse sources like web pages to visualizing it in interactive and insightful ways. Once you’ve finalized your “euro cup table” report, you can easily upload it to Power BI and create dashboards to share your findings with other Power BI users, fostering collaborative data exploration and analysis of Euro Cup history.