Data from FIFA World Cups 2010 (South Africa), 2014 (Brazil) and 2018 (Russia) collected from the FIFA website from the section of each match's facts. The original data were pdf files, which were cleaned and organized. The data was collected for the analysis of competition networks in soccer matches, where the high and low performance teams were studied. The zip file contains 3 folders of each world cup. Each folder contains the following files: - Players performance measures: input_worldcup.csv. This file contains information from 'fulltime statistics' and 'teams statistics' original files, complete for each match played in the world cup. More detailed player statistics is only complete for the teams that were champion, runner-up, and the teams that accumulated the less points and goals-against in their respective world cup. - The description of each column can be found in data_dictionary_worldcup.csv. - The list of countries that participated in the world cup with its abbreviation is found in countries_abbreviations_worldcup.csv. - The result of each match is found in tags_worldcup.csv - The players position information is the tactical line-up for World Cup 2010 and initial actual formation for World Cups 2014 and 2018. This information was manually set as a best approximation of position for the starting 11 players and a receiving shots nodes 'XS' - special for the visualization developed. The x-axis is between 0.5 and 6 and y-axis is flipped and between 0 and 6. - Folder of ball passing distributions for each match and team. The name of each file contains the match number and the team's ball passing distribution. The column names are the players numbers who received the ball. Rows represent 'from' and the columns 'to'. Each value are the number of passes between players.