| Year | Home Team | Away Team | Total Goals | |------|-----------|-----------|-------------| | 1954 | Austria | Switzerland | 12 | | 1938 | Sweden | Cuba | 8 | | 1954 | Hungary | South Korea | 9 |
As the next World Cup cycle begins, analysts would do well to revisit Fjelstul’s work—and politely lobby for a 2018/2022 extension. Until then, worldcup remains the gold standard for historical football data in R. worldcup r package jfjelstul
In seconds, you’ve identified the legendary 12-goal quarterfinal of 1954. The package’s major limitation is its cutoff. The last tournament included is Brazil 2014. Data for 2018 (Russia) and 2022 (Qatar) requires merging from other sources or waiting for an update. A Note on the Author James Fjelstul is not just a package maintainer; he is a political scientist and legal scholar who applies computational rigor to institutional data. His worldcup package is a model of academic data transparency—clean, documented, and free. It is part of a larger ecosystem of sports data packages he contributes to, all built on the philosophy that data should be a public good . Final Verdict For anyone teaching data science, building a football dashboard, or simply settling a pub trivia bet, the worldcup package is indispensable. It transforms 85+ years of World Cup history into a playable dataset, ready for exploration. | Year | Home Team | Away Team
library(worldcup) library(dplyr) goals %>% group_by(match_id) %>% summarise(total_goals = n(), .groups = "drop") %>% arrange(desc(total_goals)) %>% left_join(matches, by = "match_id") %>% select(year, home_team, away_team, total_goals) %>% slice(1:3) The package’s major limitation is its cutoff