[ARCHIVED] 2016 Quidditch World Cup
written by Aine Murphy • December 14 2016 • Last Updated July 23 2025
Before we get to this year’s results, let me first give you a little history about the IQA Quidditch world cup. While the USA has been running their own “world cup” since 2007, the first official world cup that involved more than the US and one or two other countries, the name “world cup” regarding the USQ (US Quidditch) was discontinued in 2014, was in July 2012.
It was first called the “Summer Games”, unofficially tieing into the 2012 Summer Olympics. In fact, this first tournament was held in Oxford, UK even as the Olympic torch was passing through! This first tournament had five teams taking part (Australia, Canada, France, United Kingdom and of course the USA). The USA were the champions this first year.
As of 2014, and under the updated IQA which became a true international sports federation it was renamed the ”Global Games”. This year the number of teams participating rose to seven, with Belgium, and Mexico (and almost Italy) joining the original five. This tournament was held in Burnaby, BC in Canada, with the USA again taking the title of World Champions.
The use of the * denotes which team caught the snitch.
This year the world cup was held in Frankfurt, Germany. Initially, 25 teams were set to compete but after four teams were forced to drop out (Five really but Brazil joined) for various reasons, funding a large factor for at least a couple. Sweden, New Zealand, Pakistan, Uganda and Peru sadly were unable to make the trip to compete. Funding is something many teams struggle with, and often you will find fundraising campaigns through sites like Indiegogo, go fund me etc raising money for teams travel and living costs during tournaments.
The only qualification, currently, quidditch has in order to compete in the world cup (since it is classified as an up-and-coming sport) is that the participating team must be representing a region’s national governing body.
This year’s tournament was preceded by exposition matches with Canada facing the UK, Turkey vs Mexico, and Australia vs Germany. With Team Uganda having to drop out the South Korea vs Uganda match was cancelled and replaced with a friendly match between South Korea and Brazil.
This year was an intense competition that started with 5 pools of teams each playing the other teams in their pool once throughout day one of the tournament. This pool play set up the teams in a ranked order to set up the bracket play for day two. After a gruelling day of pool play and a 100% snitch catch percentage, it was Canada who was ranked #1 seed.
The teams who ranked 1st through 11th in the pool play were automatically placed in the round of 16 matches, while the rest of the teams had to play play-in matches before continuing through the tournament in single elimination matches. The teams who lost their play-in games were eliminated and those who lost in the round of 16 moved on to the round of 16 consolation matches. The same happened with the quarter-finals, with quarter final consolation matches. This bracket play enabled the sport to develop an official world ranking of the 21 teams that participated.
As you can see, this year’s champions and the team to end the USA’s undefeated streak was team Australia. The final match approximately 31 minutes of intense action. The US was leading between 10 and 30 points for the entire match, and even had a snitch catch called no good at one point that had the Australian team breathing a sigh of relief when it was deemed no good and play resumed. When it came down to the snitch catch by Team Australia that ended it all, you could feel the tension in the atmosphere, even through the live stream, as the referees, snitch and coaches deliberated the legitimacy of the catch. You see, when a snitch is caught not only do the ref’s talk with the snitch to make sure the catch was clean (pulled from the shorts without grabbing any part of the snitch runners clothes); the seeker must not have been “beat” with a bludger before pulling the snitch free.
In this match, the snitch catch, there was a moment where it was thought that seeker Dameon Osborn of the Australian Dropbears was beat before his catch. After consultation with the assistant refs, snitch and head ref (as well as the coaches of course) it was determined that while Osborn was indeed beat before his catch, the beat was deemed no good itself because the beater who threw the bludger was themselves beat before their beat. Thus, the beat on Seeker Dameon Osborn was deemed no good, and thus the Australian snitch catch was deemed good and Australia secured a come from behind victory, beating the US 150* - 130.
If you want to watch this intense match, to extreme for words and commentated by the amazing Willow Rosenberg (@hackerwitch on twitter) watch it here!
(By this point there were technical difficulties with the stream so the quality is not great)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2GiX5pmGzw - is another angle of this match, with a different commentator and a bit better quality.
This year we had the selection of the first-ever “Team World” chosen by the organising committee:
(Better quality video of the selection of team world)
Team World:
Ashley Cooper - Coach (UK)
Willow Rosenburg - Volunteer (UK)
Dameon Osborn - Chaser (Australia)
Patricia Heise - Chaser (South Korea)
Maurice Ghazi - Chaser (France)
Verena Deutsch - Seeker (Slovenia)
Tyler Walker - Beater (USA)
Lisa Tietze - Beater (Germany)
Louis Lermytte - Keeper/Captain (Belgium)
For your viewing pleasure, I also would like to present the live streamed video from the bronze medal game between the UK and Canada; which ended in a UK win with a score of 190* - 60.
If you would like to watch any more of the live streamed games from the tournament, including the expo games that did not have technical difficulties, you can find them on youtube under the name Joe Schmoe.
