Krum's Quidditch Career

[deadstop2001]

No: HPFGUIDX 41669

Kristin:
>>Or maybe Krum has missed alot of school
>>due to his professional Quidditch career.

Aldrea:
>Thank you!  THAT is why I spent an hour searching through bits of 
>GoF.  I -swear- I read somewhere that Krum is still in school 
>because he can only do half a year, what with playing for Bulgaria

I know I wondered about this too, and I don't think it's answered in 
GoF.  Krum is clearly a Durmstrang student in fall 1994, when he 
participates in the Triwizard Tournament ... but he also spent at 
least the previous summer playing for the Bulgarian national team in 
the Quidditch World Cup tournament.  Furthermore, he spent most of 
what should have been his (presumed) last year at Durmstrang at 
Hogwarts instead.  (Do we have hard data on whether the foreign 
students actually attended classes while they were hanging around 
waiting for the Tasks?)  So he could easily be behind in school.

One thing I did notice, thanks to the unexpected popularity of the 
(soccer) World Cup in the U.S. this year, is that Viktor may not 
actually be a professional Quidditch player yet.  World Cup soccer is 
played between national teams, every four years, just like World Cup 
Quidditch.  These national teams are *not* the same as the individual 
professional league teams within the various countries.  I think that 
holds for Quidditch as well -- notice that it was *England* that had 
the embarrassing loss to Transylvania, not any of the specific 
English teams we've heard of like the Cannons or the Wasps.  Thus, we 
do not have to imagine that Krum had a longstanding professional 
career with a team like the Vratsa Vultures (the only Bulgarian pro 
team mentioned in QttA); he may simply have been a gifted Durmstrang 
player who was recruited specifically for the Bulgarian national team 
in the 1994 World Cup.  There's still the question of how much school 
he'd have had to miss the previous year for national-team practices 
and so forth, of course.

Soccer/football fans: Can you tell us more about how World Cup team 
recruitment works in the real world?  Might a gifted "school" player 
(perhaps university in the real-life case, since we have higher 
education and the WW doesn't) be selected for such a team?  Or does 
Viktor's place on that team imply that he *was* a pro player already?


Stacy Stroud
The Only Slightly Informed