What do you get if you cross football and the NRL with the maternal love and protection of your mother? Unless you have the world’s greatest imagination and the inference abilities of Sherlock Holmes your answer is probably not Bubble Football.
Bubble Football (or Zorb football as it is also known) may well be one of the entertaining quasi-sports of all time – think silky smooth skills that separate the best footballers from the rest of the field combined with NFL highlight reel hits.
The sport is the product of two Norwegian gentlemen geniuses who thought “soccer would be much more fun if the players were enclosed inside giant bubbles made of transparent plastic”. Correct, it most certainly is.
Bubble Football is played with five players (four ‘scorers’ and one goalkeeper) across three 10-minute periods, and by and large the rules are similar to indoor soccer, except for one incredible addition.
Players can block, barge or tackle other participants off the ball. Now it becomes interesting – mainly because the impact force of two inflatable balls smashing into each other is so much greater than the collision of two bodies.
The result: Players go flying.
The best thing, despite the superficial violence, is that Bubble Football is most likely the safest contact sport of all time. And who could argue? Players are literally bubble wrapped.
This means that your mum won’t be angry about you flinging yourself headlong into your best friend – in fact, the injury risk is so low she could even join in if she wants.
From humble beginnings Bubble Football has grown rapidly, from the first televised game in 2011, it is now played across Europe and there are murmurs that it is spreading into Quebec, Canada. No doubt, it will quickly spread through the US.
Famed TV host Jimmy Fallon as already attempted to popularise the sport, however it appears to have fallen on deaf ears in the States, at least for now.
If you are one of the few people that believe traditional football to be mundane, and reveal in the physicality of man-on-man contact, and seeing human-beings fly across a playing field in ferocious contact then Zorb Football might just be for you.
Here is a rather fantastic trailer…
And one of the first televised professional games (skip to 1:10).
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