primeideal

I just participated in the 2012 Harry Potter Interhouse Fest on LiveJournal. This was prompt 73:

Characters: Heidi Bell, Katie Macavoy

Female bonding over being two women in the British and Irish League. Despite the presence of an all-female team (which neither of them play for), professional Quidditch is still very much a man's world. Friendly competition and kickass women!

So, my reactions to this were, in no particular order:

-“Quidditch gen? Awesome! I want to write for this!”

-“To what extent is Quidditch a man's world? How do we know?”

-“Who the **** is Heidi Macavoy?”

Well, I eventually did write for the prompt. But not before trying to dive into what we can learn about the world of professional Quidditch, and a bunch more we can guess and wonder.

So as not to keep you in suspense; Heidi Macavoy appears only in the computer game Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup—she's a Chaser for Hufflepuff. While I tend not to rely on movie/video-game canon in my fic, this prompt was too good to pass up. So I began with the computer game to find out more about Quidditch at Hogwarts.

That lists rosters for all four houses, circa book 3. Girls included on the Hogwarts teams include, of course, Katie and her fellow Gryffindor Chasers, Alicia Spinnet and Angelina Johnson. Cho Chang is the Ravenclaw Seeker, and the game introduces two more Hufflepuffs; Chaser Tamsin Applebee and Beater Maxine O'Flaherty. (Nobody from Slytherin, who “go for size rather than skill” under Marcus Flint's leadership. That said, the Harry Potter: the Exhibition travelling props do suggest that girls have captained the Slytherin team in the past.) At any rate, those rosters translate to seven girls out of twenty-eight players overall, exactly one-fourth of the school rosters.

How might this generalize into the professional world? We can take a guess, but there's something very weird going on here. There are only four House teams, which means only twenty-eight kids are playing school Quidditch at any given time. But there are thirteen teams in the British and Irish Quidditch League! Without looking up the statistics, I think it's fair to say there are very few real-life leagues where the number of professionals outnumbers the eleven-to-seventeen-year-olds actively competing by a factor of over three to one. That doesn't even include the reserve teams where Oliver Wood and company compete.

There is a workaround for this, which I'll get to later. For now, let's take a look at the computer game to learn more about the gender breakdown in Quidditch at, well, the World Cup level!

The game lists rosters for nine teams, including Bulgaria; using movie canon to supplement the fourth book, we can also piece together more about the world champion Irish team. I was particularly interested to see what positions women tended to play—Rowling's “Quidditch through the Ages” notes that the position of Beater is most likely to be taken by a wizard rather than a witch, since on average a lot of bulk is needed to thwap the Quaffle. In contrast, Seekers tend to be the smallest and fastest flyers, so we might expect to see more witches in that role.

Chasers: 30 players, 13 women.

Beaters: 20 players, 9 women. An even higher percentage of Beaters than Chasers are women! In fact, from this data the most striking conclusion is that Beater teammates tend to be the same sex—they were in all but one of the international teams, the exception being the “Nordic Team.” One wonders where, exactly, magical boundary lines are demarcated. Perhaps Quidditch players expect some sort of "compatibility" there—the Beaters we see most closely, after all, are the Weasley twins, and Quidditch through the Ages informs us that the Broadmoor brothers were also a famed pair of Beaters in their day.

Keepers: 10 players, 1 woman: Sendelina de la Felino of Spain. The Wikia pages for some of the Spanish team have been edited since I accessed this data in late August, and I think there are some mistakes in the listed genders now, but I also think this is correct. This seems to be where the computer game designers assumed “manly” bulk was called for, which makes me doubt that Rowling came up with most of these names. Ah well, onwards!

Seekers: 10 players, 6 women. So that hypothesis seems reasonable.

Overall, we have 29/70 women in the national teams, which seems to be rather more parity than we get on the Hogwarts level.

I also noted the captain of national teams, when HP Wikia had them listed. (Spain's is missing, for some reason, and Ireland don't have one listed either.) Those consist of five Chasers (four men and one woman), one Beater (a woman), and two Seekers (both women). So there seems to be plenty of parity at the elite levels. (All four captains of the Hogwarts teams at the time are male.)

Browsing Quidditch through the Ages for more names beyond those given yields a few; Chasers Hamish MacFarlan and Catriona McCormack, Keepers Darren O'Hare and Meaghan McCormack, and Seekers Eunice Murray, Roderick Plumpton, Josef Wronski, and Maximus Bronkovitch III. The italicized players were captains of their club or national team. That's a whole lot of Seekers taking charge, considering they barely interact with their teammates mid-game!

So, which gender ratio to extrapolate from for the purposes of my own fic—the 40% women levels suggested by the World Cup scene, or the 25% that seems more likely from Hogwarts? I went with the latter, but not assuming that the British and Irish Quidditch League is just made up of Hogwarts graduates, who would all have to play at least three times as long as they are in school to make sense of the 13 versus 4 teams problem I discussed above—longer wizarding lifespans, but still!

No, I suspect that the birthplace of Quidditch prides itself on having the best league in the world, and in importing talent from all over. (Or what they think is talent, as in the case of poor Dragomir Gorgovitch.) So what might the ratio of British and/or Irish players to new signings?

I suspect we can compare the Quidditch league to the real-life football (soccer) Premier League, in terms of its prestige. But the Premier League is limited to teams from England (and sometimes Wales), with Scotland and Ireland having their own systems. These are very divergent, as seen here; http://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/en/default/gastarbeiterstartseite/basics.html Premier League players are roughly 30% English, 15% from the rest of the British Isles, and 55% from elsewhere. But Wales and Ireland have little to no imported players.

While the Quidditch league might take after the Premier League prestige-wise, its non-English teams are drastically overrepresented. Of the thirteen teams in the league, only six are from England proper (compared to about 77% of Britain and Ireland's population). So, anything I conclude is going to be a wild judgment call.

For the purpose of my fic, I decided, based on not much better reason than it sounding good, that a third of the players in the league came from overseas. Of the remaining two-thirds, perhaps twice as many are English as non-English.

Then, if there are 13*7=91 players in the league, and on average about a quarter of them are women, we expect to see about 23 women in the league. But they're not evenly distributed! By tradition, all seven of the Holyhead Harpies are female, and so that means there are sixteen on the other twelve teams. About eleven of them are Hogwarts alumni, for my purposes, and the other five transferred into the league. Of those eleven, maybe seven are eligible for team England, and the other four for Scotland, Wales, or the seemingly-unified Irish team.

Which is where I finally got to start writing my story; for my intents and purposes, Katie is English and Heidi Macavoy is Scottish. With these odds in mind, probably at least one of them had a fellow woman on their club at some point, but maybe not for very long. And perhaps one was a mentor for a newcomer to England. The chances are good that either or both of them would have been suggested as an alternate Seeker at one point, probably by well-intentioned but annoying male teammates.

As I said, it's all a bunch of speculation, but it was extremely fun to think about.

The Noble Sport of Warlocks: original post, on Ao3, and FFN.

P.S. for football/soccer fans: The computer game designers also seem to have tried to reflect the ethnic diversity of various sporting countries in their World Cup teams. England have a dark-skinned captain, Avery Hawksworth, and Beater Indira Choudry is likely a British Indian. One might wonder whether Germany's Turkish minority will soon enjoy the Quidditch success that their Muggle counterparts experience on the pitch.

Among the three presumably African-American members of team USA is a Chaser named Robert Green.