Quidditch.
Where do I start? On a first read-through of the description of Quidditch, my assumption would be that Rowling is one of those people who doesn't really like sports that much, and finds all the rules and regulations and traditions to be incomprehensible to right-thinking people. Therefore, she decided to make up a sport that is actually incomprehensible, and claim that the participants actually enjoy both playing and watching it. After reading the books several times, my assumption has not changed.
Only one thing matters in Quidditch, in 90% of the games played, and that is catching the Golden Snitch. All the other stuff, tossing the balls through the rings, avoiding the bludgers, etc. is just a meaningless distraction. The other members of the team have almost no reason to be there. And yet somehow the sport has been enjoyed throughout the ages, without making the kind of changes that all sports undergo over time to either make it more interesting or make it safer for participants, or both.
Also, just one sport? Even a small town high school has five or six sports that kids engage in. Wouldn't some wizard version of "track and field and sky" be something worth looking into? Something endurance related?
No. A small percentage of students get to play the one sport the school has to offer, and everyone else is just out of luck.
Like the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Quidditch seems needlessly thrown away in the writing. You can make it both silly and interesting and actually potentially fun to play and watch if magic were real and people could ride on brooms.
Why is there a golden snitch at all? Without it, the game is structured a lot like soccer or water polo or any of a dozen other team sports that involve trying to get a ball past another team, past a goal keeper, into a goal. The addition of bludgers makes for a fun twist on that theme, and makes for great comedy. Then there's this golden snitch that invalidates everything.
You get a ball through a hoop, and that's ten points. Why ten? The basic unit of point for any sport, ever, in the history of all sports, with the possible exception of tennis, is 1. Even in games where you can have different scores for different things, there is still a way of acquiring a single point. In basketball, baskets are 2 or 3 points, except the free throw, which is one. In American football, most scores are 3 or 6 points, but after a touchdown you get to kick for an extra point. In Quidditch, a score is worth 10 points. It could just as easily be 1 point, there's no lower score possible than 10. Catching the golden snitch is 150 points. It could just as easily be 15. It's the same spread relative to the 1. For a team to win without the Golden Snitch, they would need to score 15 unanswered goals against the other team. In most sports between teams of similar levels, that kind of spread doesn't happen very often. Maybe in basketball, but can you imagine a soccer match with a score of 20 - 5?
If I were developing a team, I would be tempted to try a couple different things. One would be to focus on offence for the rings, and defense for the snitch - in other words, put a lot of power into making those goals, and tell the seeker to just keep the other seeker from getting anything done. The other strategy would be to reduce my energy in the regular game by taking one of the beaters and having them fly with the seeker, to maximize the ability to see the snitch, and fend off the other seeker.
If I were coming up with a wizard-centric school sport, as a writer, I'd want to create something with some familiar elements, add some silly and/or fun elements that can only be done with magic, and think about how it would be fun and exciting for both participants and fans. In other words, I'd keep all the elements of Quidditch except the Golden Snitch/Seeker piece, and I'd probably add a time limit. If I wanted to do something bizarre with the time limit to make it possible for the game to go on and on, I'd do something like "the game is 60 minutes long, but every score adds 5 minutes to the clock."
Also, and this is something I find a little bizarre also, each school team only plays 3 games in an entire year. With four teams, each playing 3 matches, that's 6 games in about 9 months, or about a game every 6 weeks for spectators, and one game every three months for participants. On top of that, unless a team wins all three matches, there's a high liklihood of a tie record between two teams. Say, for example, that Gryffindor beats Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, but loses to Slytherin. On other other hand Ravenclaw loses to Gryffindor, but beats Hufflepuff and Slytherin. Then Slytherin loses to Ravenclaw, but beats Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. Hufflepuff has a losing season, and the other three houses tie with 2 wins each.
So lame.
How about every team plays every other team 3 times. That's 9 matches for each team, which comes out to 18 total matches for the year. At the end, the two teams with the best records play each other for the title.
Expanding out into the rest of Britain and Ireland, apparently there are 13 teams. At 7 people per team, that's 91 players at a given time. It's been established that there are about 3,000 wizards living in Britain, of all ages, about 40 new ones being born each year. I am assuming, based on some observation in the movies, that most pro-quidditch players are probably in the 18 - 30 year-old age range. I could be wrong, but it does seem like a sport that favors youth, speed, and strength. So that means there's a pool of about 500 wizards who could be on these teams. I'm guessing that any pro team would have at least a couple of people ready to play if one of their team becomes incapacitated. So lets say 10 players per team, for 13 teams means 130 people out of a pool of about 500. Then you have your fans, right? Fans for 13 teams? Let's say they have roughly equal fan-bases. That leaves about 220 fans for each team, of all ages. And that's only if every wizard of every age is a fan of quidditch, which we know isn't true. The math just doesn't work out very well for me, in terms of creating a believable scenario for a professional sport. On the other hand, maybe most Quidditch players have day-jobs, like the Olympic-level curling teams we cheer on every four years in the Winter Olympics.
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