Quadball Dropped the Name Quidditch in Twenty Twenty-Two and Kept the Seeker, the Flag and a Gender Rule Almost No Other Sport Has
Seven players a side, four balls, a seeker who is not allowed on the pitch until the twentieth minute. The World Cup is biennial and the last one was in Brussels.
Quadball is played seven against seven on a pitch of 66 by 36 yards, with three chasers, one keeper and two beaters on continuously, and a seeker who enters after twenty minutes. It was renamed from quidditch in July 2022.
Scoring
| Action | Points |
|---|---|
| Quadball through an opposing hoop, by a chaser or keeper | 10 |
| Flag catch by a seeker, available after 20 minutes | 30 |
Beaters use dodgeballs to remove opponents from play temporarily, which is the mechanic that stops the sport being a straightforward handball variant.
The name change
The sport dropped "quidditch" in July 2022 for two reasons at once. One was a trademark problem with Warner Bros. The other was a deliberate distancing from J.K. Rowling and her views on transgender people. The replacement refers to the game's four balls and keeps the Q.
Renaming a sport away from the fiction that created it is a hard thing to survive. Quadball did it while keeping its rulebook, its governing bodies and its calendar intact.
The gender rule
As of 2024, a maximum of three players not matching a given gender may be on the field at one time. In practice that produces mixed-gender competitive teams as a rule of play rather than as a policy statement, which very few full-contact sports have written into their laws.
The structure
The International Quadball Association is the world governing body, with national governing bodies running domestic competition and selecting national teams. The IQA World Cup is biennial; the most recent was held in Brussels in July 2025.
Where it sits on Playdash
Playdash does not price quadball. This is editorial coverage of the emerging competitive calendar rather than a market preview.
Rules, scoring, pitch dimensions, the renaming and its reasons, the gender rule and World Cup schedule as published in encyclopaedic reference sources on quadball. The 2025 World Cup champion was not named in the source consulted and is not stated here. Correct at the time of writing on 30 August 2026.