I am a huge Harry Potter fan. In fact, I’m having a Harry Potter-themed wedding in just a few weeks.
Like many things I love, I like to completely overthink and overanalyze every detail.
In the spirit of this, I took a deep dive into analyzing how hard would it be to make it in the wizard sport of Quidditch?
Quidditch as a Professional Sport
Quidditch is the most popular sport in the wizarding world of Harry Potter.
If you are not familiar (and really, why are you reading this if not), it’s played between two teams of seven players riding flying broomsticks, using four balls: a Quaffle, two Bludgers, and a Golden Snitch. The goal is to score the Quaffle through hoops protected by keepers, Bludgers are used by beaters to knock people off their brooms, and the game ends when a seeker catches the Golden Snitch, also earning 150 points for their team.
In the Harry Potter world, there are actually professional Quidditch teams and in book 4, Harry and the gang even go to watch the Quidditch World Cup.
In our simple muggle world, we have lots of professional sports and we generally think that it is quite difficult to become a professional athlete. It takes a lot of talent, tons of training and coaching and perhaps a little luck.
Looking at the numbers (shown below), if you play college basketball, you only have about a 1% chance of being drafted. The best draft percentage is in baseball and that’s only 9.1% amongst people good enough to play at the college level.
| NCAA Participants | Approximate # Draft Eligible | # Draft Picks | # NCAA Drafted | % NCAA to Major Pro* | % NCAA to Total Pro^ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseball | 34,554 | 7,679 | 1,206 | 695 | 9.1% | — |
| M Basketball | 18,684 | 4,152 | 60 | 44 | 1.1% | 19.1% |
| W Basketball | 16,593 | 3,687 | 36 | 35 | 0.9% | 4.9% |
| Football | 73,660 | 16,369 | 253 | 251 | 1.5% | 1.9% |
| M Ice Hockey | 4,102 | 912 | 211 | 51 | 5.6% | — |
| M Soccer | 24,803 | 5,512 | 81 | 75 | 1.4% | — |
However, since the wizarding world is quite small in population in comparison to our muggle world, lately I’ve been thinking about how hard would it really be to play Quidditch professionally?
I mean, how many people even get a chance to play Quidditch while growing up?
At Hogwarts, there’s only 4 teams, one for each house, so in any given school year, there are only 28 people that play on a team. That’s a pretty small pool to draw from.
When I was a kid growing up in Canada, every kid played hockey. Even in my tiny home town, in comparison to the number of kids that play Quidditch at Hogwarts, there were way more kids graduating high school having at least played on an organized team.
When you start to think about the small wizarding numbers, it seems that almost anyone that graduates from Hogwarts that played Quidditch during their time there and has a desire to play professionally, should be able to walk onto any professional team (even Cormac McLaggen!).
But that’s just my hunch.
To get a better idea, let’s crunch some numbers and see what the draft percentage really is.
What is the Population Size of the Wizarding World?
According to JK Rowling, there are about 600 to 1,000 students at Hogwarts.
Being generous, let’s assume it is 1,000 students.
If we assume the average family size is 3.5 people and we assume every student at Hogwarts is from a different family, then we can estimate the size of two generations as 3.5 x 1,000 = 3,500 people.
Now accounting for grand parents, let’s assume 2 grand parents per family, then that’s an additional 2 x 1,000 = 2,000 wizards and witches, giving us a total population of 4,500 wizards and witches living in Ireland and the UK.
That’s a pretty small population compared to the 70 million or so muggles that live in the UK and Ireland.
According to the Harry Potter Wikia, there are 19 professional Quidditch teams in Ireland and the UK.
That’s a hell of a lot of teams for this small world.
In comparison, the NHL started in 1917 with just 7 teams and at that time Canada had a population of about 8 million. Even if we are off by a factor of 10 in our estimation of the wizarding world size, that’s still a HUGE difference.
Estimating the Quidditch Draft
Since there are 4 teams at Hogwarts, each with 7 players, there are at most 28 new people eligible for a draft at Hogwarts each year. It is likely smaller since some players would be too young to play professionally, but let’s assume the best case.
Let’s also assume that once someone becomes eligible, they stay eligible for 5 years.
This means, in any given year, we have at most 5 x 28 = 140 eligible draft picks.
In the NBA, there are 60 draft picks each year, 2 per team. If we assume a similar draft scenario for Quidditch, there are 19 x 2 = 38 potential draft picks each year for teams located in Ireland and the UK.
This means, even in this very generous scenario where everyone that plays Quidditch at Hogwarts is eligible and willing to play professionally, then given all things equal, each eligible player has a 27% (38 / 140) chance of getting drafted for a profession team!
That’s pretty favourable. Basically 1 in 4 people playing at Hogwarts are likely to play professionally.
It’s certainly possible that professional Quidditch doesn’t have a formal draft like our sports. Even the draft for muggle sports is a more modern era phenomenon. Maybe they only draft players when there’s a new opening?
We can estimate the number of new players needed by taking the total number of players in the league against an estimate for the average length playing career.
We know there are a minimum of 19 x 7 = 133 people playing Quidditch professionally. If we assume the average career length is a generous 10 years (it’s about half that for most muggle pro sports), then 133 / 10 = 13.3 people retire each year.
Based on this, we can estimate an eligible player as having a 9.2% (13 / 140) chance of playing professionally. About the same as being drafted in baseball.
However, during Harry’s time at Hogwarts, he played with 11 different people. Only Oliver Wood went on to play professionally. Everyone else chose to do something else with their life.
If we assume a similar ratio for all eligible players, that is 8% (1 / 12) actually want to play professionally, that cuts our potential draft pool from 140 to 12.
With only 12 people in the draft, they are guaranteed a spot on a professional team.
How Good Can These Teams Really Be?
We know that only Oliver Wood went on to play Quidditch professionally, yet we know Harry’s team won the Quidditch cup twice and Harry was the youngest seeker in 100 years. We also know that Harry’s father was a really talented player, yet none of these people chose to play beyond Hogwarts.
Also, prior to Harry arriving at Hogwarts, the last time Gryffindor won the Quidditch cup was when Charlie Weasley played for the team and yet he also does not play Quidditch professionally.
How is it that all the best players in their respective generations are choosing non-professional playing careers?
Can you imagine if the top basketball and football talent all decided to go get a desk job after college rather than play professionally? We’d end up with a pretty sub-par collection of athletes, which it appears the Quidditch premier league is comprised of.
Final Thoughts
The math doesn’t lie.
Even with generous assumptions in favour of a more competitive draft, it appears that anyone that is willing can play Quidditch professionally.
Further, I don’t see how the wizarding world can really support Quidditch as a professional sport, especially with so many teams. They just lack the numbers to make it competitive.
Came for the Survivor stayed for the Harry Potter, loved this post.
Totally agree that it seems the best players from Hogwarts don't go on play professionally but think there are 2 major reasons why:
1. International talent from other schools (ex. Viktor Krum) would also be draft eligible. They would likely choose in the most competitive league available similar to foreign born players in the NBA.
2. With the story taking place in the UK owners would likely follow the same strategy as their muggle counterparts. Teams could have youth academies where they pluck the brightest Quidditch talent at an early age and have them get their education/training with the team.
In this scenario the top talent wouldn't be attending Hogwarts but some could be talented enough to play.
Hey Robbie. Thanks for stopping by. I'm glad you enjoyed the post.
I think even taking into account international talent, the total pool of competent Quidditch players is pretty small relative to how many professional teams there are.
I like the idea of academies dedicated to training and fostering Quidditch talent. However, Viktor goes to a regular school and is one of the best in the world. Now perhaps Harry isn't good enough to play professionally, yet he's the best seeker in a generation at Hogwarts. You'd think there'd at least be some mention of scouts to check out the Hogwarts talent pool.
Pre attending a magical school, I'm not sure where team scouts would get enough information about a young player to put them into one of these academies.
Bye the way, I love how serious this discussion about the feasibility of a professional Quidditch league just got :-).
Haha, serious discussions about nonsense are always great.
One factor that there is no way of knowing is how long average player's career's are. Maybe players play well into their 40's so roster turnover is low and leads to very short drafts. Though I agree their seems to be too many teams compared to the population of wizards available to play (kinda like Hockey 😉 ). Also, totally agree that Harry is good enough to be scouted so we clearly have JK Rowling to blame for that missing detail.
Sadly, as I thought about the academies idea a little more I think I may have poked a hole in my theory. It seems that even pureblood students don't learn to fly until their first year at school so it is unlikely that any child would be able to be properly scouted in time to skip formal schooling.
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I hope someone sees this �� so while I love your analysis I think you underestimate the international competition. But on the flip side, I also doubt teams have only 7 plays. It’s well known that games sometimes last days and even weeks, it seems unlikely to me that they would risk being without a player at any given time. The alternative is that they take breaks which seems smarter but also, quidditch seems like a sport with players that would rather die than admit any level of defeat! So I think there are alternates ultimately increasing the chances of a player getting on a professional team. In the 6th book Harry remarks that Ginny is a good player (with her and Ron being evenly matched against Harry and hermione). It’s possible that Harry just can’t admit to someone being better than him, but he’s usually very comfortable with things like that. Loss isn’t a personal defeat to him typically. So that said, I think the reality is that most people just don’t want to play professionally for whatever reason. Ginny did, Ginny made the team, even if she isn’t the best player in the world (and that’s a real big ‘if’ for me because I adore Ginny).