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How many wizards/witches make their living through Quidditch in Britain?

We know that there are 13 teams in the League.

  • How many players are there on a pro Quidditch team? (factor in backups/replacements, so more than Hogwarts team)

  • How many people at a minimum would be employed by a Quidditch team who aren't players?

I'd prefer canon/word-of-god data, but well reasoned models are acceptable in absence of such.

Mike Scott
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DVK-on-Ahch-To
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1 Answers1

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Well, have some reasoning:

  • A team has 7 players on the field at once. They would have at least one backup for each position (if a game goes on for days, all players would require replacements), so that's at least 14 players per team.
  • A team needs at least one coach, who (at the big-league level) is probably not a player. There might be specialist coaches as well, like a Chaser coach or Keeper coach (similar to how you have your offensive/defensive co-ordinators in gridiron football, your pitching coaches in baseball, your goalie coaches in hockey, etc). One coach per position would result in a head coach and four sub-coaches, though this seems unlikely to me. Two or three total seems more reasonable.
  • A team needs an equipment manager - broom polishing, cloak patching, glove fitting, and so on. Maybe two, but one should suffice for 14 players in a sport where equipment damage seems to be mostly in the rips and tears category.
  • Assuming each team has a home stadium, they need a "grounds crew" - finger quotes because in an aerial sport the condition of the ground itself doesn't matter so much. But yeah, you'd need ticketmasters, custodians, security, refreshments, and so on. I would say a stadium needs 50-100 workers.
  • Then there's management and the owners. Could be somewhere between 5 and 15 depending on how "big" the team is; in a small league you wouldn't need that many top-level guys.
  • Assuming pro Quidditch is anything like other sports, players would need agents for working out contracts, trades, and so on.
  • Umpires. In a 13-team league you can have at most 6 games on at once, and umpires are said to get the weirdest injuries, so there's probably 15 or 20 of them total.
  • The squabblers. Unions and so on. Could vary wildly depending on a bunch of factors. For the sake of a number let's say that there's a players' union and an owners' union with one member from every team (13+13), plus a couple of lawyers for an even 30. The umps probably have a union of about 5.
  • Marketing. You'd need print ads and radio ads for each team, probably created by teams of 5-10 people each.

Putting all these numbers together results in a total in the range of 1220-2100; the biggest contribution is the stadium workers. Since the wizarding population of England is estimated by this answer to be in the 3000-10,000 range, this seems somewhat reasonable for higher population and lower Quidditch-career values.

Toomai
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    Hmm.... most of the answer makes perfect sense except the very last sentence. 1/8th (to 1/2) of the population being employed in Quidditch is not what I'd label "reasonable", IMHO. – DVK-on-Ahch-To Mar 22 '12 at 02:05
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    50-100 workers? When all of them can do magic? Seems rather a lot to me. Security is probably the biggest task because it's also wizards that'd be causing trouble; but this kind of issue seems to be handled normally by ministry employees who are summoned only when there's a riot starting (apparition is quick enough). – leftaroundabout Jun 04 '14 at 19:15