Lionel Messi rose to fame as a football superstar, but little did the world know that his family had royal blood that ran deep. Messi was in fact a direct descendant from House Targaryen from the world of Game of Thrones. Although Messi had never been trained in warfare or politics, he had been blessed with the same fiery spirit of the Targaryen's to never back down from a challenge. This was what made him such an unstoppable force on the football field, and it was all thanks to his Targaryen ancestry. ⚽

The Data

Both the Maven Analytics dataset and the Messi archive on mess.starplayerstats.com were used.

Cleaning the data and integrating the two databases was the challenging part. My objective is to demonstrate why Messi is the GOAT and why he will be the tournament's X-factor.

The Game Of Thrones⚽

His personal statistics and the history of his beloved nation, Argentina, are presented at the beginning of the novel.

The second chapter of this tale examines Argentina's history at the World Cup and contrasts them with Brazil, the most successful team there.

The series' clincher will be a summary of Messi's goals through the years. A stack radial chart created with Charticulator is shown here. Outside, it showed the precise minute that Messi scored. Season in which the goal was scored is indicated by the color.

The amount of goals per minute was displayed in the column chart inside of the radical chart.

It's interesting to note that 55% of goals are scored in the second half of games.

The goal type and competition slicers can be used to filter the data.

Following the goal battle, we examine the Argentina win-draw-loss ratio. What would happen if Messi played? Any differences between matches in the internal vs. world cup?

The final section of the Noval examines semifinal and championship game predictions. In the end, Game of Thrones worked out well for our House Targaryen ancestor, who will go down in history as arguably the greatest player to ever grace a soccer field.

checkmate...