When Portugal got to the first knockout stage of the 2018 World Cup, my editors asked me if we could get something “data-driven”. Sports is always a topic where data is abundant, but for this specific case, I had a problem: datasets were almost all paid.

With a problem in my hands, I improvised. And remembered the hours I spent playing FIFA games on the game console and how much data it used to contain about the players. So I used that data to compare both players teams and, with the help of a sports reporter, we wrote a text about the differences between both teams.