History of Horseball

If you think that horseball is a pretty weird sport, then you’re very right – I mean, it’s essentially about a bunch of people riding horses and throwing an odd ball with handles around! That’s not a sport, that’s something straight out of a Monty Python sketch! But you’d be surprised to know that it used to be even weirder – a few hundred years ago, instead of a ball the players tossed around… a duck. Yes, this version of horseball, known then as “pato”, was very popular in Argentina and used a real, live duck in a basket as its ball, but had to be made illegal pretty quickly due to a high rate of mortality among the players (which I only assume was caused by the duck breaking free and exacting its bloody vengeance). Still, that didn’t stop Argentinians from having the time of their life for, like, the fifteen minutes in which the game was legal, and eventually made pato their national sport. Fast-forward to the 1930s, Argentinians decided to stop provoking the duck deities and just replace the duck with an actual ball, which saw a significant drop of fatalities and, soon enough, the sport was reborn as horseball! Now that it didn’t involve feathered death, destruction and despair, more and more people began finding horseball rather fun, causing it to spread across Europe, and eventually overseas. As of right now, almost half of the countries that are part of the aforementioned FIHB (Fédération Internationale de Horseball, for those of you suffering from short-term memory loss) are located outside of Europe. For a sport that started out with someone shouting “Hey, I just caught this duck, wanna throw it around while riding horses?”, horseball seems to be doing just fine for itself!

Rules of Horseball

You must be very confused as to what horseball is after reading its past bloody history, so let us enlighten you on what the sport is by giving you a quick run-down on the rules.

For starters, you need two teams with four players in each one. Every team can substitute up to two players per game, and they are only allowed to have two substitutes waiting to be picked.

Both teams have a designated captain and they’re the only player allowed to speak to the two referees. Interestingly, teams can be mixed, meaning that men and women can play together, except in sex exclusionary leagues, of course.

The horse can be of any breed as long as they are five years old. Players generally prefer shorter horses, because they can pick up the ball more easily. Children are allowed to be on ponies instead.

The teams play on a rectangular field with non-slippery surface, usually sand. The field is about 65 metres by 25 metres. The ball resembles a football as it’s of similar size, but it also features six leather handles to make it easier to grab, pass, and throw while riding a horse. Each game is 20 minutes, with two halves of 10 minutes and a 3-minute break between them.

The objective of the game is to throw the ball into the opponent’s ring, similar to basketball and quidditch; the team who scores the most goals wins the game. However, it’s not that simple. Before you try to get the ball in the ring, you have to make at least three successful passes to three different members of your team.

Beware, that the ball must be thrown to be considered a pass; handing the ball to another player is not counted. To make things even harder, a player may only have the ball for 10 seconds before passing it to another player.

The game begins with a toss coin, similar to football, which determines which team is going to pick up the ball first. The other team must then choose part of the field to defend and they must not move from their positions before the ball falls or before an opposing player crosses the centreline.

If the ball is currently held by an opponent, one can pick up the ball as long as they remain seated on the saddle and only uses one hand to grab with. One may not be standing on the stirrups while trying to pick the ball from another player or the ground; doing so will result in a penalty.

Players are allowed to tackle their opponents out of bounds (their part of the field) as long as they are seated. However, tackling is forbidden when a player is about to pick up the ball. Players are allowed to pick up the ball if it falls on the ground, but they can only pick it if they are travelling in the same direction as the ball before it drops in order to prevent collision.

All in all, these are the basic rules of horseball.