I'm used to the visual design of ARD/ZDF in Germany. Thoughts:

* One team is "above" the other. This implies ranking between the teams. Who decides who's on top of the other? Imho a bad idea.

* The clock is unnecessarily bloated. I find the added visual markers distracting. The stoppage time is misleading, because additional play time is not a stopwatch or a timer. It is merely a suggestion and while most judges adhere to it, there are some games where additional play time is exceeded. It's not strict as a stopwatch implies.

* Ball possession: While being an interesting statistics, they are usually shown only once during an entire game. This kind of stuff is now easily retrievable during the game on a tablet or smartphone ("second screen"). Some people find the statistics completely unnecessary, because the only relevant statistic is goals, which is always shown anyways. I also don't see how extensive animation in the interface is not distracting.

* Formation screen: Just a different flavor. Nothing worse or better than the current one.

To summarize: Well, it's a suggestion, but I can't see that this is BETTER than the current layout, which the final paragraph implies about this design.

I don't particularly understand the point of this. There's absolutely nothing hard to distinguish about a score on the television, especially when soccer is a low-scoring game which isn't all that hard to keep track of if you're remotely paying any attention, and channels like Univision have incredibly minimalistic, easy to distinguish graphics. I don't know what Sky is doing, but ESPN and Univision are pretty straightforward.

All I get out of this is some people trying to Web 3.0-ify something that doesn't need to be. The clock looks absolutely dreadful and sticking minutes on top of seconds is an unnatural approach to displaying time in the context of a sport.

The clock is actually harder to read this way. I want to glance and know what time we're on. By presenting the time in an unconventional way, you're making it difficult for me to do that. It also doesn't offer a way to distinguish between extra time and stoppage time.

When a player is booked, injured, substituted, etc I prefer to see what's, you know, happening. If you want to help me do that, you shouldn't obstruct my view with a giant bezel containing an icon and some text. I will go further and say that the icons are rather vague, especially in the example given. A football (I mistook it for a wheel at first) and a name? Thanks television, that cleared things up!

A yellow card icon should simply be yellow. Two cards as an analogy to a red card isn't a good one, as red cards can be given without a yellow one being given prior. I'm assuming the sniper's visor is meant to indicate penalties, it's a little disturbing to be honest.

These and other mistakes, mentioned in other comments, could've been easily avoided with a little domain knowledge. Once again, it's form over function.

I notice there are no screenshots of these terrible UI's the author mentions. Probably because they are not terrible. They show a clock | team name | score | score | team name. It couldn't get much simpler to understand.

One important aspect: this is going to be unreadable on CRT TVs

Yes, there's still a lot of them out there. Yes, it must be catered for them still.

Some TV stations still make sure their image looks good on B&W TVs. Really

You can't forget the fact someone is watching it on a 14' CRT, and it's not a small amount of people.

Some thoughts:

* Showing colors of jerseys is not necessarily new, ARD and ZDF in Germany are doing this for a long time now.

* I like the round clock BUT! Why are the seconds below minutes? It's confusing. Why does the red bar representing stoppage time grow while the stoppage time itself shrinks (it's a countdown)? Does not work well together imo. What do you display when the game lasts longer than stoppage time? -00:56? And why take the screen estate of seconds for stoppage time? They aren't gone or anything. And I get the intention of "cutting" the clock in half for representing half times, but since the shape is primarily a clock I was wondering why the 30 minute mark is important. I'd cut the clock in quarters and use three of them to display the game's progress (45 min - one half).

* How does this work on low-res TVs? They are still out there and need to be considered.

* Did they explain their icons? What's e.g. the soccer field icon supposed to tell me?

As a whole it doesn't seem to be thought through, sadly.

"We love a clear time indication, and Helvetica seemed to be the clearest typeface for our display."

No, I highly doubt you did any research. Helvetica numerals don't work well here, especially with sloppy kerning.

"We thought it could be interesting to add some useful informations without distracting you from watching your game."

Like the glitchy animation for showing/hiding scores?

"It’s not just a trend: infographics, pie charts and diagrams participate in your daily inspiration."

"participate in your daily inspiration" sounds terribly awkward.

Very hard to take this serious.

What a misleading headline. Redesigning the infographics is not redesigning the World Cup.

Let me start by saying that I really like the clean look. I'm a fan of flat design. From a design point of view (visually encoding information that is) the layout doesn't make a lot of sense though. Putting one team above the other (as ntaso pointed out) isn't a good idea. Not only does it imply ranking, it also takes away the opportunity to show which team plays on which side and can't handle double-digit scores all that well. "FRA 7 : 11 BRA" works a lot better. I can see why they did it though. If the teams weren't stacked there wouldn't have been any room for the pretty clock (which I like a lot). But that's not how design is supposed to work. The indicators next to the team's names are completely unnecessary. Which score belongs to which team seems fairly obvious.

The info graphics part seems a bit over the top as well. A (animated?) clock icon, the time itself and the subtitle "Local Time" seems a bit redundant. Surely the unit explains what the information is supposed to be. "96,000 people" doesn't need "Attendance" added to it. Let alone the huge icon. The local temperature doesn't have a subtitle and I figured out what it is anyway. And again, the indicators ...

The "POSSESSION" (not sure why this one is all caps) graphic I like. Kind of. Three indicators - really?. The one in the middle makes perfect sense but the other two? The shirts are unnecessary as well. You already have the colours inside the graphic, put the names of the teams in there. The rounded corners don't fit the visual language either; make them square like all the others.

The "Formation screen" is okay I guess.

The stoppage time counting down loses information. Seeing 2min/5min is better than seeing "3 min left"

Wait, what is the "21" supposed to represent? Seconds?

Why put the scores on top of each other? The team on the left should be on the left, and the team on the right on the right. Many channels use this left-right layout, but they fail to swap it around at half-time, when the teams change sides!

Another one of those classic HN threads whereby tech geeks attempt to "improve" something you clearly understand very little about and end up being schooled by those with experience.

1. As has been covered; the team names on screen represent home and away not the side of the pitch. This format has been in use for decades and cannot be improved. Every football fan in the world understands it. You are 0/1.

2. Thanks for the blinding suggestion of putting the team formation on the screen before the game begins. If only every football game had such a thing already. Oh wait, it does and has done since the 1970s. You are 0/2

3. The clock design is unintelligible. The idea of the clock onscreen is purely to give you information when you glance at it, not to detract from the action on screen with measurement bars and large typefaces. 0/3

4. You completely misunderstood about red and yellow cards. Straight reds can be given, they are not always 2 yellow cards. 0/4

5. Football does not need space for double digit scores. 0/5

6. Who cares about possession mid-game? You fail to grasp that half time is for analysis. 0/6

7. Stoppage time is not fixed. It is the referees perception and is affected by events during stoppage time itself. The countdown bar is useless. 0/7

8. the beauty of football, most fans would agree, is the lack of stats and quantative analysis. Midfielders are not ranked according to passes attempted/completed or defenders by tackles successful. Football is subjective and heuristic and the fans and the sport itself is happy to embrace that. Infographics only ever get trotted out when a manager needs fired. 0/8

9. Football is the most popular sport in the world (by a massive margin) with the worlds biggest network television providers optimising every single aspect of the on and off-screen experience. Children in african villages, Brazilian favelas and Norwegian forests understand it intuitively. Any design change you could make would be minutely incremental and certainly not grounded in Web 2.0 or 3.0 type principles. You can see this attitude displayed in the hostility of football fans to american-style video refereeing. It would destroy the pace of the game. Football is subjective, anecdotal, memory based and contentious. It's why we love it. If you attempt to data-fy it the consensus will find another channel (IMO).

I have not even touched on television types, sponsorship and branding, the terrible choice of icons you chose (why is there a basketball in your icon set??) and other things.

I love design attempts but don't redesign a sport you clearly don't understand. Customer Development comes before User Development. Understand my sport before you attempt to understand my UX needs.

This is a fun concept. We're used to top/bottom alignment of teams here in the US, with the home team on the bottom. That trend was started by baseball.

BTW, you have to leave room for network branding. For example, where does ESPN put their logo?

I clearly agree that the current graphics sucks, however I feel you are missing one major point in this discussion: Where's the sponsor's promotion? That said, if I had to guess why we ended up with this abominable graphics, I believe that 30% of it is pure corruption, 40% is tasteless "let's make it look like a yunday" and the remaining is actually the desired "favela style".

If instead this design is currently being used by any channels, I think switching back would be an improvement.

Where are you supposed to put the ads?

Nicely done, ignore the haters.

Stop with that flat design everywhere.

This was a reach at best and IMO not a very good article at all.

They left out the sponsors and the FIFA logo, which makes it a non-starter.

Anybody following the EPL would know that they have their on-screen graphics done very well, especially starting last season.

Minimalist but informative (and with sponsors!):

http://images.mukki.org/11-08/21/tv_shows/EPL.2011.08.20.Eve...

But what football really needs is a way to scratch below the surface and expose casual fans to the tactics and little bits of skill involved. The television camera really doesn't do games justice compared to what you see/hear watching in real life.

Sky started doing this with computer analysis this year, watch this if you want your eyes opened a little in terms of what goes into breaking down modern football:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9upX7wyJy4E

This is done post match, but they are beginning to highlite player movement, formations and heatmaps with technology much in the same way the NFL got their yellow line for television.