I know there's a TriWizard Tournament, but has there ever been a quidditch tournament between the magical schools?

That would be pretty cool if there has been. Like a team made up of the best players from Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw competing against other magical schools.

That would be a pretty dope fanfic, where James Sirius Potter competes in the very first Magical School Quidditch tournament.

 

While I generally dislike fics with a larger magical population, an inter-school Quidditch league is one of the few advantages to such an arrangement. I've always enjoyed the idea of Hogwarts playing against other British magical schools. But first those schools have to exist.

However, were you to centre a fic around Quidditch, I think you would have to fix the sport as well (the old Seeker/snitch problem). My own preference is to keep it so the seeker catching the snitch ends the game, but it awards no points. So it's an important strategic position but not a one man victory. This also has the benefit of keeping some of the game's more quirky attributes such as games potentially lasting for days.

 

I don't mind the idea of keeping the 150 points for the Snitch, but make it so it doesn't mark the end of the match. Instead release another, harder to catch Snitch, while the overall goal of the match is being the first team to reach a point threshold. This way you keep the best of all worlds while removing a weakness from the idea of the sport.

 

It could be an interesting plot point to have quidditch reform try to be introduced, too. See the pushback and what not.

"First the mudbloods come for our magic and now they want to mess with Quidditch?!"

 

Could be a fun post war fic. Secretive meetings amongst the purebloods that have the Aurors worried. New badges and pins subtly worn by certain demographics, as if advertising allegiances. Draco Malfoy and Ronald Weasley were seen meeting in a shady pub. The gossip rags explode with speculation - is Harry Potter exerting pressure on Malfoy through Weasley to spy on a resurgent Death Eaters? Has Weasley gone over to the side of the blood purists? Or is it something else, something more sinister?

No, it's just the resistance to the Department of Magical Games and Sports getting its sticky fingers over their Quidditch as they try to 'modernise' in an attempt to combat Quodpot in the Americas, and compete in the as yet untapped but lucrative market.

 

While I agree the snitch is worth too many points, removing the points entirely renders it pointless. There should be some points involved. How many exactly will depend on how swingy and points heavy you make quaffle play. If chasers are scoring lots of goals, a 30 point snitch might work - enough to win a tied game or one you're only trailing a little, not enough to render non seekers irrelevant. That makes seekers important but not more important than everyone else.

 

I like that idea although instead of a point threshold, I would make the game last a certain amount of time. So it actually resembles a normal sport... Not sure I'd want to watch a match that goes on for days.

 

I guess so and if I think of the WC final between Ireland and Bulgaria as an example, people could just go back to their tents and chill for a bit, then come back... But it seems somewhat anticlimactic in comparison to the actual match... Also thinking about the practicality aspect of not knowing whether a game will last 5 minutes (is that possible?) Or 5 days seems a nightmare for the organisers. Not to mention how would the players cope(possibly breaks or substitutes)?

 

One fic I once read made the snitch a lot harder to catch, with chasers scoring hundreds and hundreds of points. That would make it valuable but not always so.

 

Ooh I just had a thought (happens occasionally), what if the snitch is almost impossible to catch at the beginning but gets easier as time goes on? That could somewhat regulate the length of matches without imposing a time limit.

 

It's been a while since I read Quidditch through the Ages, but I'm sure there's mention of a match that went on for weeks, and players had to be brought on so that the current players could eat and sleep.

I've seen in a fic before that it's recent broom advancements that made the seeker the most important part of a team - the snitch's difficulty has stayed the same over time, but seekers can now actually attempt to chase the snitch for the points, rather than hoping to either sneak up on it, outmanoeuvre it, or have the rest of the team help herd it.

I remember covering something in physics in college about the manufacture of poles, for the pole vault, and how there were arguments about what materials they could be made of - something to do with a newer material meant old records being smashed completely, because the energy capacity and flexibility were greater. So you could well have an argument that making brooms with an acceleration of greater than 30 m/s^2 (or whatever) ruins the game. Broommakers now have to work on hitting the limits and going no further, meaning there's not as much money in it for them, so they're now looking to sponsor the upcoming 'Quidditch unlimited' league, and the Turkish ministry getting involved to try and set up a carpet league, and so on.

 

Except unless one of the teams is woeful compared to the other, a 15 goal difference seems extremely unlikely. Indeed, we saw exactly this at the world cup in GoF: a team catching the snitch but not winning was considered a tiny chance, even when it was known that Krum was an excellent seeker and Ireland had excellent chasers.

Disagree. The ability to end a match on your own terms is a huge advantage. How many football tournaments would have had a different result if the team in front had been able to end the match at 80 minutes, thereby avoiding a last-minute equaliser from their opponents?

The Manchester United vs Bayern Munich Champions League final comes to mind.

 

It's worth considering that Quidditch doesn't finish until the Snitch is caught though, so a game can go on for a very long time.

If, in the past the snitch was harder to catch, the average game would be longer, and the longer a game goes on, the more a small advantage of one team will be reflected in the score line.

Most of the Quidditch games we see in the books seem to last an hour or so max, and chasers seem to be scoring roughly 150-300points in these games. Even in that time frame, some of the Hogwarts matches have Slytherin or whoever, 50+ points ahead when Harry inevitably saves the day.

In that context, we'd assume that catching the snitch is likely to finish with a win only if the teams are very evenly matched, or the game is less than say 5 hours. Any longer, or if one team is markedly better (as Ireland was) and it's very likely that one team can pull ahead by a couple hundred points purely from goals and catching the snitch become purely a tactical decision as to how much you want to hammer your opposition or put your team out of their misery.

On that note, if as above, the snitch is becoming easier to catch due to advances in brooms, the games will logically become shorter and the snitch becomes correspondingly more important. Taking this to it's conclusion a Quidditch reform will inevitably be necessary when in the future, Seekers are always catch the snitch in 10 minutes or so and ruining the game as a decent spectator sport. That said, if you can improve the charms on a broom, presumably its possible to improve the charms on the snitch as well?