Data Underlying “Structural Reorganization of Elite Men’s Water Polo: A Quasi-Experimental Multivariate Analysis of the 2025 Rule Changes”

<p dir="ltr">This dataset contains the team–match-level data underlying the analyses reported in the associated study, “Structural Reorganization of Elite Men’s Water Polo: A Quasi-Experimental Multivariate Analysis of the 2025 Rule Changes.”</p><p dir="ltr">The data were collected from official World Aquatics match reports provided through OMEGA Timing. The dataset comprises 192 team–match records from the 2024 and 2025 Men’s Water Polo World Championships, with 96 records from each tournament.

It includes 50 candidate performance indicators covering four domains: offensive performance, goalkeeping, exclusions, and game management. Following the prespecified variable-screening procedure, 42 performance indicators were retained for the final domain-level analyses.</p><p dir="ltr">The files include the IBM SPSS Statistics dataset, a codebook containing variable names, definitions, units, coding information, and variable-screening status, and a README file describing the dataset.