About

The chart we want to reproduce is a dumbell barplot about the number of shares and losses of the teams with the highest number of Bundesliga matches.

It has been created by Cédric Scherer. Thanks to him for accepting sharing his work here!

As a teaser, here’s the chart we want to reproduce:

Dumbbell Chart

Libraries

In order to create this chart, we will use the following libraries:

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(forcats)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggtext)
library(scales)
library(prismatic)

Data

The data used for this chart can be created as follows:

df_matches <- 
  tibble(
    team = c("FC Bayern München", "SV Werder Bremen", "Borussia Dortmund", "VfB Stuttgart", 
             "Borussia M'gladbach", "Hamburger SV", "Eintracht Frankfurt",
             "FC Schalke 04", "1. FC Köln", "Bayer 04 Leverkusen"),
    matches = c(2000, 1992, 1924, 1924, 1898, 1866, 1856, 1832, 1754, 1524),
    won =     c(1206,  818,  881,  782,  763,  746,  683,  700,  674,  669),
    lost =    c( 363,  676,  563,  673,  636,  625,  693,  669,  628,  447)
  ) |> 
  mutate(team = fct_rev(fct_inorder(team))) |> 
  pivot_longer(
    cols = -c(team, matches),
    names_to = "type",
    values_to = "result"
  ) |> 
  mutate(share = result / matches) |> 
  arrange(team, -share) |> 
  mutate(is_smaller = if_else(row_number() == 1, 0, 1), .by = team)

## number of not-Bayern teams for emphasis later
n <- length(unique(df_matches$team)) - 1

Set up parameters for the chart

Before starting to actually create the chart, we need to set up some parameters that will be used later on such as colors and annotations.

Colors

Let’s define the colors that we will use for the chart. We will use the clr_darken() function from the prismatic package to create a darker version of the base color.

pal_base <- c("#EFAC00", "#28A87D")
pal_dark <- clr_darken(pal_base, .25)

grey_base <- "grey50"
grey_dark <- "grey25"

Theme

We will use the theme_minimal() theme from the ggplot2 package. We will then update it to match the style of the chart.

Here are the main parameters that we will update:

base_family and base_size to set the font family and size for the whole chart
axis.title to remove the axis titles
axis.text.y to set the horizontal alignment of the y-axis labels
panel.grid.minor and panel.grid.major to remove the grid lines
plot.title and plot.caption to set the title and caption of the chart
plot.margin to set the margins of the chart
plot.background to set the background color of the chart
legend.position to remove the legend

theme_set(theme_minimal(base_family = "sans", base_size = 22))
theme_update(
  axis.title = element_blank(),
  axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 0, color = grey_dark),
  panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
  panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
  plot.title = element_textbox_simple(
    size = rel(1.25), face = "plain", lineheight = 1.05, 
    fill = "transparent", width = unit(8, "inches"), box.color = "transparent", 
    margin = margin(0, 0, 35, 0), hjust = 0, halign = 0
  ),
  plot.caption = element_markdown(
    size = rel(.5), color = grey_base, hjust = 0, margin = margin(t = 20, b = 0),
    family = 'sans'
  ),
  plot.title.position = "plot",
  plot.caption.position = "plot",
  plot.margin = margin(25, 25, 15, 25),
  plot.background = element_rect(fill = "white", color = "white"),
  legend.position = "none"
)

Annotations

And then we define the main annotations of the chart, using the paste0() function that basically concatenates strings.

title <- paste0(
  "Among the ten teams with the most Bundesliga matches, <b>Bayern Munich has the <b style='color:",
  pal_dark[1], ";'>lowest loss</b> and <b style='color:", pal_dark[2], ";'>highest win</b> rates</b>"
)

caption <- paste0(
  "<b>Graphic: Cédric Scherer • Source: kicker.de<br><br></b>Teams are ranked according to the number of ",
  "Bundesliga matches they have played so far"
)

callout <- paste0(
  "<b>Frankfurt</b> is the only team listed<br>that <b style='color:", pal_dark[1],
  ";'>lost more games (37.3%)</b><br>than <b style='color:", pal_dark[2], ";'>they have won (36.8%)</b>"
)

Dumbell chart

Now let’s actually create the chart. Here is what the code mainly does:

Layers: the chart is built using several layers such as geom_point(), geom_text(), stat_summary(), geom_richtext(), etc.
Scales: the scale_x_continuous() and scale_color_manual() functions are used to set the x-axis and the colors of the chart
Labels: the labs() function is used to set the title and caption of the chart
Theme: the theme() function is used to set the theme of the chart

n <- length(unique(df_matches$team)) - 1

p = ggplot(df_matches, aes(x = share, y = team)) +
    
    ## dumbbell segments
    stat_summary(
      geom = "linerange", fun.min = "min", fun.max = "max",
      linewidth = c(rep(.8, n), 1.2), color = c(rep(grey_base, n), grey_dark)
    ) +
    
    ## dumbbell points
    ## white point to overplot line endings
    geom_point(
      aes(x = share), size = 6, shape = 21, stroke = 1, color = "white", fill = "white"
    ) +
    ## semi-transparent point fill
    geom_point(
      aes(x = share, fill = type), size = 6, shape = 21, stroke = 1, color = "white", alpha = .7
    ) +
    ## point outline
    geom_point(
      aes(x = share), size = 6, shape = 21, stroke = 1, color = "white", fill = NA
    ) +
    
    ## result labels
    geom_text(
      aes(label = percent(share, accuracy = 1, prefix = "    ", suffix = "%    "), 
          x = share -0.02, hjust = is_smaller-0.32, color = type),
      fontface = c(rep("plain", n*2), rep("bold", 2)),
      family = "sans", size = 4.2
    ) +
    
    ## legend labels
    annotate(
      geom = "text", x = c(.18, .60), y = n + 1.8, 
      label = c("matches lost", "matches won"), family = "sans", 
      fontface = "bold", color = pal_base, size = 5, hjust = .5
    ) +
    
    ## call-out Eintracht
    geom_richtext(
      aes(x = .46, y = 3.3, label = callout), stat = "unique",
      family = "sans", size = 4, lineheight = 1.2,
      color = grey_base, hjust = 0, vjust = 1.03, fill = NA, label.color = NA
    ) +
    annotate(
      geom = "curve", x = .51, xend = .43, y = 3.3, yend = 4, curvature = .35, 
      angle = 60, color = grey_base, linewidth = .4, 
      arrow = arrow(type = "closed", length = unit(.08, "inches"))
    ) +
    
    coord_cartesian(clip = "off") +
    scale_x_continuous(expand = expansion(add = c(.035, .05)), guide = "none") +
    scale_y_discrete(expand = expansion(add = c(.35, 1))) +
    scale_color_manual(values = pal_dark) +
    scale_fill_manual(values = pal_base) +
    labs(title = title, caption = caption) +
    theme(axis.text.y = element_text(face = c(rep("plain", n), "bold"), size=14))
ggsave("img/graph/web-dumbell-chart.png", width = 8.5, height = 7, dpi = 600)

The version we reproduced is slightly different from the original one. We used different fonts, which makes it easier to reproduce.

Going further

This post explains how to create a dumbell chart with nice features such as annotations, nice color theme and others, using R and ggplot2.

If you want to learn more, you can check the bar chart section of the gallery and another beautiful bar chart built with ggplot2.

Dumbell chart with custom annotations