Horseball explained, the rules of the sport and how the game is played

Two teams of four attempt to throw a ball through the other side's ring; whoever scores most wins. The ball spends very little time still. It is a size-4 football wrapped in a harness with six leather handles, and a rider collects it from the ground at speed by leaning out of the saddle, stirrups strapped together so they can get back up again. The horse has to be moving while they do it.

Watch a few minutes and the comparison that comes to mind is basketball rather than polo: constant passing, quick turnovers, and scoring that depends on getting bodies into the right places. There is no stick. Everything happens with hands, at a gallop, between animals that weigh half a tonne.

The pitch is a riding arena, 60 to 75 metres long and 20 to 30 wide, with 65 × 25 treated as ideal. A security zone runs down each long side. Two referees officiate, one mounted and moving with play, one seated with a full view of the arena, connected by radio. A match is two halves of ten minutes with three minutes between them, which sounds short until you have seen the pace.

One thing worth settling before going further: the spelling. English sources split between horseball and horse ball, French ones write horse-ball with a hyphen, and a search for a horse ball game turns up the same sport as a search for horseball. There is a trap in that phrase, though. Most of the search traffic behind horse ball game is people shopping for a large inflatable toy their horse can shove around a paddock, which is a different product and a different afternoon entirely.

So what is horseball at the level that matters to a spectator? It is a team sport with a rule that forces teamwork, played by riders good enough to do all of this one-handed.

One rule defines the sport more than any other: a goal counts only after the ball has passed between three different players of the same team. Handing it over does not count, it has to be a real pass. Lose the ball and the count starts again. No one may hold it for more than ten seconds.

Tackling is allowed and tightly bounded. A player may lean on an opponent shoulder to shoulder, arm against the body, using the horse's weight and speed, but never at more than 45 degrees to the direction that player is travelling, and never by pushing the rider or striking them with the horse. The whole penalty scale exists to keep contact from becoming dangerous at speed.

Those provisions are set out across three separate rulebooks: one for play, one for the competition framework, one for what a host venue must provide. Each is described below.

The game descends from pato, Argentina's national mounted sport. A French cavalry officer adapted it in 1936; the war stopped it; French riding instructors rebuilt it in the 1970s as a way to make riding schools less military. Everything after that is codification.