Dribbling is a meaningful skill in soccer, due to its effectiveness to create opportunities for scoring. Several studies analyzed dribbling actions from different perspectives, including among others, the development of talented players. Despite recent progresses, however, there is still no consensus about the definition of dribbling. This study proposes a more comprehensive definition than earlier applied, considering the key elements present in other proposals found in the literature. This study aims to validate the proposed definition considering evaluations with three experts working with events from the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™ contest and also to apply the proposed definition in the analysis of the effectiveness of dribbling actions performed by elite players when playing for their respective national teams. We designed a protocol to collect the opinion from experts regarding the classification of events as dribble or non-dribble. To evaluate the quality of experts’ opinions working with the novel dribbling definition, we computed the accuracy and precision, and Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient to measure the agreement between them. On average, the accuracy and precision values reach $96.25±4.51%$, and $97.08±1.91%$ and an agreement rate of $0.93$. The obtained results indicate that our definition of dribbling was clear and easily understood by the experts, which suggests that it could be useful to support soccer scouting of dribbling actions. Furthermore, the agreement value showed a near-perfect consensus between experts. We also analysed the effectiveness of dribbling actions considering the number of dribbles per 90 minutes played and success rate distributions for different national teams and their respective players that participated of the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™.