Redesigning The World Cup 2014 Brazil

And even during a world cup double-digits can be reached quite easily when the game is decided by penalty shootout.

The whole point of a layout is to be flexible.

1. As has been covered; the team names on screen represent home and away not the side of the pitch. This format has been in use for decades and cannot be improved. Every football fan in the world understands it. You are 0/1.

2. Thanks for the blinding suggestion of putting the team formation on the screen before the game begins. If only every football game had such a thing already. Oh wait, it does and has done since the 1970s. You are 0/2

3. The clock design is unintelligible. The idea of the clock onscreen is purely to give you information when you glance at it, not to detract from the action on screen with measurement bars and large typefaces. 0/3

4. You completely misunderstood about red and yellow cards. Straight reds can be given, they are not always 2 yellow cards. 0/4

5. Football does not need space for double digit scores. 0/5

6. Who cares about possession mid-game? You fail to grasp that half time is for analysis. 0/6

7. Stoppage time is not fixed. It is the referees perception and is affected by events during stoppage time itself. The countdown bar is useless. 0/7

8. the beauty of football, most fans would agree, is the lack of stats and quantative analysis. Midfielders are not ranked according to passes attempted/completed or defenders by tackles successful. Football is subjective and heuristic and the fans and the sport itself is happy to embrace that. Infographics only ever get trotted out when a manager needs fired. 0/8

9. Football is the most popular sport in the world (by a massive margin) with the worlds biggest network television providers optimising every single aspect of the on and off-screen experience. Children in african villages, Brazilian favelas and Norwegian forests understand it intuitively. Any design change you could make would be minutely incremental and certainly not grounded in Web 2.0 or 3.0 type principles. You can see this attitude displayed in the hostility of football fans to american-style video refereeing. It would destroy the pace of the game. Football is subjective, anecdotal, memory based and contentious. It's why we love it. If you attempt to data-fy it the consensus will find another channel (IMO).

I have not even touched on television types, sponsorship and branding, the terrible choice of icons you chose (why is there a basketball in your icon set??) and other things.

I love design attempts but don't redesign a sport you clearly don't understand. Customer Development comes before User Development. Understand my sport before you attempt to understand my UX needs.

When we name our company you won't mind if we put my name first then.

> FYI, the highest score in a football match is 149:0

I don't think non-televised protest matches matter. The EPL (probably the most watched league in the world) has literally never produced a double digit scoring match (that's approx. 7980 matches).

> And even during a world cup double-digits can be reached quite easily when the game is decided by penalty shootout.

You're not arguing from knowledge at all, you're just googling shit to be contrary. You don't add the goals from the penalty shootout to the total, they are a separate scoreline.

That's an old problem really. Somebody has to go first. Home team over away team, alphabetical order, etc. I think we've solved that problem.

Of course 149:0 isn't representative. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't though. The point is you do have to worry about edge cases. Take the ball possession graphic for example: Picture what that might look like for a color blind person. Not all that helpful.

I know they currently keep two different score boards but I'm not sure that has to be that way (could be though - I don't know). The site I use to check the scores merges them after the game but the FIFA website doesn't.

I'm not trying to be contrary btw, and I'm not sure why you're offended. I said I really like the design, but I do think they removed a lot of flexibility and clarity for no reason by changing most of the layout without putting all that much thought into why things look the way the currently look.

I may not know a lot about football but I do know a lot about design. I didn't even talk about the clock which looks gorgeous but (as others already pointed out) doesn't work that well.

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I've seen one of the Spanish stations use the vertical score format, a quick search turns up this (Barcelona vs Real Madrid) [1].

> I know they currently keep two different score boards but I'm not sure that has to be that way

It does have to be, because goals are infrequent it's unfair to add 3 or more goals to a teams tally, the goals can be used to differentiate between teams with the same points in league systems. There's also essentially no limit to the number of penalties that can be taken.

I'm not arguing for this design (though I do like some aspects of it), I'm just defending it against what I see as illegitimate criticism.

[1] http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/120/Purple/da/d0/4c/mzl.wlqf...