I put together a simple little app showing a Leaflet map with the locations where all the players who participated in the 2018 FIFA World Cup were born. You can filter down to a specific team using the dropdown on the top right of the page. Clicking on a flag will provide a pop-up with pictures and information about the player, along with a link to their Wikipedia page if they have one.
All data was scraped from Wikipedia, and then looking up the lat/long coordinates of their birthplace using GoogleMaps's API. Note that some of the Saudi, Iranian, and South Korean players didn't have their birthplace indicated at the time the data was scraped, so those players were placed in the middle of their countries.
My code for the app and for extracting the information from Wikipedia and getting the lat/long coordinates of their birthplace is here: Posit Cloud
As a soccer fan, I love this @phil! Can you also place the code in an RStudio Cloud project and add a link to it here. This will help us reproduce the app as well as help others play with it. You can find contest specific instructions for RStudio Cloud here.
