When it began, real-life quidditch was for the Harry Potter faithful only. But increasingly, people are playing it just because the enjoy the sport.

When you think of real people running a field around with broomsticks between their legs, tossing a ball back and forth and through hoops, your first instinct is probably to assume that they’re big Harry Potter fans. What they’re doing looks vaguely like Quidditch, the wizard sport Harry and his friends play in the series. And often, you’d be right.

But according to The Guardian, people are increasingly becoming attracted to quidditch (not capitalized to differentiate it from the sport played in Harry Potter) for reasons that have nothing to do with J.K. Rowling’s landmark series. “I’d never read the books when I started playing,” said player Ben Morton … It’s more the sport that I picked up.”

As someone who only read about Quidditch on the page, it’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of people playing it for reasons other than devotion to Harry Potter, but the real-life version of the sport has gotten pretty big since college students Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe invented it in 2007. The next quidditch world cup, called the IQA World Cup, will take place in Frankfurt on July 23 and 24, will host teams from 25 countries.

This team from Uganda will be the first African quidditch team to play in the World Cup. Photograph: Matthew Guenzel.

“As the development of quidditch has exploded across the globe and more nations have got involved, the World Cup has become more competitive and serious,” said UK quidditch coach Ashley Cooper. “In the UK, we have nationally organised player scouting and tryouts, and the national squad trains all year round. It is something we take seriously. We’re going out to win, and that’s something common to almost all national teams out there.”

It sounds as though Morton and Cooper take quidditch as seriously as many of the characters in Harry Potter take Quidditch, which is serious indeed. “Quidditch is a sport formed effectively from three mini-sports,” Cooper says. “[R]ugby, dodgeball, the snitch game; which need to combine together to form a single cohesive team. That’s highly difficult and requires a great deal of tactical thinking and training, which I also love.”

Cooper also says that quidditch players embrace the gender inclusivity of the game (no more than four players of the same gender are allowed on the field at one time), which has been one of its hallmarks from the start. As for the matter of the broom between the legs, Cooper compares it to prohibition on touching the ball with one’s hands in soccer—every sport has a handicap, and the broom is quidditch’s.

Will we one day live in a world where quidditch games are broadcast live on ESPN, or reported on regularly by FanSided? We can only hope.