The Horseball Championship Calendar: European, World and Club Titles

Horseball does not run a season in the way club football does. The horseball championship calendar is a set of title events, each held every year or two, usually attached to a major horse show that already has an audience. There is a World Cup, three European championships: Senior, Lady and Under-16 pony, and a Champions League for clubs, plus regional international competitions around the edges.

The gaps matter as much as the dates. A European Championship that skips 1997, 2004 and 2008 is a competition being fitted around host availability rather than run to a fixed cycle, and the years it skipped are mostly years when something else, a first Junior European Cup, a first World Cup, took the slot.

The senior title is the oldest and the most revealing. Sixteen editions between 1992 and 2011, and France won every one of them. Spain, Portugal and Belgium rotate through the other two podium places; Italy and Austria appear occasionally. A European championship in this sport has, for its whole recorded history, been a contest for silver.

The first edition was played at the Salon du Cheval in Paris in 1992. The second was at Wembley, inside the Horse of the Year Show, an early sign that the sport's growth strategy was to appear where equestrian crowds already were. Almost every horseball championship in this record was staged inside somebody else's event.

Three competitions sit in the structure with edition numbers and no results at all: a Champions League for under-16s, a European American Cup and an Asian Cup. Two of them carry numbered rows, which means somebody laid the table out expecting to fill it.

That is a different kind of information from a result. A calendar with an Asian Cup drawn up and never held tells you where the sport intended to go, and the distance between the intention and the record is the honest measure of how far it got. The same applies in reverse to the women's championship, whose seventh edition is known to have taken place in 2012 and whose podium is not in the record. One is a plan without an event; the other is an event without data, and a calendar that reports both is more useful than one that quietly drops the rows it cannot fill.

The world-level competition arrived late. A World Cardon Pato-Horse-Ball Championship was held in Buenos Aires in 2006 with ten nations entered, and the first Mixte World Cup followed at Ponte de Lima in 2008, France taking the title from Spain, with hosts Portugal third. That edition also brought Argentina, Brazil and Canada into the international field for the first time.

The Champions League is the club competition, and the interesting one. Chambly won the first two editions in Stockholm; after that Cardedeu of Spain took two titles, Blanzac of France one, and Caramel of Belgium reached the podium in three consecutive years. Whatever keeps France unbeaten at national level does not transfer to their clubs.