"To find out how many deaths actually occurred during the last two decades among FIFA players (2001-2020), we used Wikipedia - "List of association footballers who died while playing". To know how many cases occurred in 2021, we used the list collected by us in "Real-Time News" (which includes the cases noted in Wikipedia for 2021)."

There are cases that didn't make it to wikipedia (14 for 2021). The graph there is just not accurate to what is in Wikipedia e.g. more one listed in 2018.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football...

That said the cases are elevated in 2021