FIFA world cup 2018 is around the corner. I love soccer, I love Excel, Let’s marry them. Here is an awesome, free FIFA world cup Excel Tracker to help you follow this year’s games in Russia.
Click here to download the FIFA world cup 2018 tracker.
What you can do with this FIFA world cup Tracker Excel?
You can use this tracker to,
- View schedules in your local time for group and knockout stages
- View summary and detailed points table
- Refresh live points table. When you refresh, the tracker show updated points based on latest results (You need Excel 2016, Office 365 or older versions of Excel with Power Query)
- View knockout stage matches as a bracket
- See timeline of the matches
- NEW – Results of the matches
- Coming soon – All the goals (will be available before semi-finals)
How to use the world cup 2018 tracker?
Start page – set up the tracker
When you open the workbook, use “Home” page to set up your local timezone and favorite teams.
Group Stage – Schedule & summary points table
The group stage view shows all teams. It highlights your team(s) in different color to see when their games will be on.
On this page, you can also see group-wise points table. This is a live table. So as the matches happen, just press CTRL+ALT+F5 to update this table. The data comes from Wikipedia FIFA 2018 page thru Power Query. So you need Excel 2016 / Excel 365 or an older version of Excel with Power Query to get the refresh work.
Bracket View – Knockout Schedule
The knockout stage shows last 16, quarter-final, semi final and final matches in bracket view. This page is not dynamic. So as group stage finishes, go ahead and list the team names in the gray cells.
Timeline View
This shows all matches in a Gantt chart like view. From this you can track all your favorite team matches. It will also highlight current date so you know which matches are coming up next.
Results View
This view shows all match results to date. This is a live table. Just press CTRL+ALT+F5 to refresh it and get new data. All the data for this comes from the excellent open football github project.
Download FREE FIFA world cup tracker
Click here to download the FIFA world cup 2018 tracker.
Errors or Problems with this template?
- Error: Points table looks funny, incorrect
- What to do:
- If you know Power Query:
Go to Points Table. From Query ribbon, edit query.
Backtrack the query to see at what step things have gone south.
Try fixing it.
Usually, this is because the wikipedia points page has been changed by someone - If you don’t know or care for Power Query
Try downloading the latest version.
As the games progress, I will test this and upload new version whenever I see serious issues.
- If you know Power Query:
- Error: Can’t see times or values in cells, All I see is #####
- What to do:
- This happens when the column is too narrow for the content
Turn on Headings from View ribbon
Adjust column width
- This happens when the column is too narrow for the content
- Error: Can’t refresh the points table
- What to do:
- You need Power Query for Excel & internet connection to refresh.
If you said no for either, try fixing the problem or manually enter points in the table. - Sometimes if the wikipedia page is in the middle of editing process, you might get funny results. Wait a few minutes (until the match is over) and refresh.
- You need Power Query for Excel & internet connection to refresh.
- Error: Something else
- What to do:
- Try downloading the latest version.
As the games progress, I will test this and upload new version whenever I see serious issues.
- Try downloading the latest version.
Which teams are you rooting for?
As usual, I am cheering for Germany and Brazil. I will also watch out how Denmark & Sweden (my former homes) are going to play.
What about you?
19 Responses to “How to Distribute Players Between Teams – Evenly”
An excellent solution, especially for large data sets.
Another solution without using solver would be to assign the player with the highest score to Team 1, the 2nd to team 2, 3rd to team 3, 4th to team 3, 5th to team 2, 6th to team 1, 7th to team 1 and it continues. This method would end up with a Std Dev of 0.001247219. This works best with a distribution with lower Std Dev for the dataset.
Full Disclosure: this is not my idea, remember reading something a few years ago. Think it may have been Ozgrid
thinking back I now remember why I read about it. About 10 years back I had to distribute around 300 team members into 25-30 odd teams. Used this method based on their performance scores. I used the method I described to do this and the distribution was pretty fair.
Solver would have saved me a ton of time though 🙂
I think the issue with you first Solver approach was that you took the absolute value of the sum of team deviations (which should always be zero except for rounding) instead of the sum of the absolute values (which is a reasonable measure of how unbalanced the teams are).
Here's another simple algorithm you could use: you start from the top (with players sorted from high to low), and at each step allocate the next player to whichever team has the smallest total so far. You can implement it dynamically with some formulas so it will update automatically when the data changes.
If the scores were more widely distributed (so that this might end up with not all teams the same size), you could add a constraint to only pick among the teams which currently have fewest players at each step, or just stop adding to any team when it hits its quota.
When I tried it on the sample, I got the three teams below, with a STDEV of 0.000942809 (i.e. about half of what Solver got to).
Team 1: John, Hugo, Tom, Josh, Eric, Zane, Charles, Andrew
Team 2: Barry, Michael, Kenny, Joe, Xavier, Patrick, Oliver, William
Team 3: Henry, Steven, Ben, Frank, Kyle, Edward, Cameron, Lachlan
Thanks for sharing!
Hi,
I was looking at all the solutions and this is closest to what I intended to do. I am dividing a bunch of players into 3 soccer teams. Players availability is also a factor while deciding the teams.
So the steps the excel needs to do is as follows:
1) In availability column if "yes" go to next
2) Equally divide 'Goalkeepers', 'Strikers', 'Defenders' basis their quality
So the end result gives each 3 teams a balance of players playing at different positions.
Can this be done on Google spreadsheet with only availability as an input from the user and rest calculates by itself.
Sorry for asking such a pointed question, but I have been struggling to find a solution for it for sometime now!
Hi Ishaan,
I am working on a similar problem at the moment, so I am wondering if you ever found a solution and if you are willing to share what you did.
Hi everyone, this is a variation of the famous Knapsack Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem.
I had to use a VBA implementation recently as part of a problem, where we ar trying to allocate teams of an organization into different locations (we are a large company with many different team). The goal was to optimally allocate teams to individual buildings without putting too many teams into one building and not splitting teams apart.
As we had around 400 teams of different sizes, solver couldn't handle it anymore. Luckily there is a Knapsack algorithm implementation in VBA readily available on the internet :).
I also went with a heuristic approach first!
An interesting mathematical solution but what if Eric and Xavier can't stand each other or Patrick is best friends with Steven - the real life problems that effect "even" teams.
@Joe
You can add more criteria like
If Eric and Xavier can't stand each other
=OR(AND(E15=1,E16=1),AND(F15=1,F16=1),AND(G15=1,G16=1))
It must be False
If Patrick is best friends with Steven
=OR(AND(E5=1,E17=1),AND(F5=1,F17=1),AND(G5=1,G17=1))
It must be True
Note that the 2 formulas above are exactly the same
except for the ranges
One must be True = Friends
One must be False = Not Friends
Nice Post!
Just one question What if number of players are not even or equally divisible.
Nice post Hui!
I download your workbook and just try to change in options the Precision Restriction from 10E-6 to 10-8 and the Convergence from 10E-4 to 10E-10. The process take almost the same time, but the results was great.
The standard deviation I got was 0,000471.
Team 1: John, Tom, Kenny, Frank, Eric, Xavier, Edward, Zane
Team 2: Steven, Hugo, Ben, Joe, Josh, Oliver, Cameron, William
Team 3: Barry, Henry, Michael, Kyle, Patrick, Charles, Andrew, Lachlan
Great application of Solver! Thanks for the link!
Great explanation. Well done... However, I tried with 6 teams of 4 players and solver never did finish.
How about vba code for the same data set.
I have 3 column A B C wherein A has text and B has number Wherein C is blank. And in C1 been the header C2 where I want the name to come evenly distributed the number which is in Column B.
My Lastcolumn is 1000.
Sorry if I'm being slow here, but how is 'Team Score' calculated? I've gone through the explanation several times but it seems to just appear.
@Hrmft
This process uses the Solver Excel addin
Solver is effectively taking the model and trying different solutions until it gets a solution that meets all the criteria
Then solver puts the solution into the cell and moves to the next cell
So yes it appears to "just appear"
Hi ! Thank you so much ! Works great 🙂
I cannot get the fourth Equation to work in my excel spreadsheet
You have =($E$2:$G$25=0)+($E$2:$G$25=1)=1 as a SUMIF solution, I have, =($F$2:$H$13=0)+($F$2:$H$13=1)=1 as my solution but it does not work. The only thing I changed is the ranges. Any suggestions?
Thank you.
Jim
I cannot get the fourth Equation of TURE or FALSE statements to work in my excel spreadsheet You have =($E$2:$G$25=0)+($E$2:$G$25=1)=1 as a SUMIF solution, I have, =($F$2:$H$13=0)+($F$2:$H$13=1)=1 as my solution but it does not work. The only thing I changed is the ranges. Any suggestions?
Sorry I left some of it out in the previous question,
Thank you. Jim