Visual Sport has rolled out a set of interactive widget for monitoring the current craze, the 2010 World Cup.  Allowing you to compare individual players from the past along with live interactive timelines of the current games, they’ve got a wealth of fascinating informaiton.

The match tracking interface contains 2 separate parts: the “Match Timeline” and “Match Commentary”, each focusing on displaying separate events (e.g. shoots, yellow/red cards, player exchanges) on an interactive timeline. The Player Comparison Tool looks more sophisticated: individual players can be benchmarked in a large variety of data attributes, ranging from their relative position on the field to an overall view of their performance in terms of presence, offense, gameplay, correctness and defense.

I’ve embedded the widget for the current South Africa/Mexico game below.

via VisualSport: Social Visualization of (Live) World Cup Football Statistics – information aesthetics.