Random Polo Teams Generator

So you drew a polo team

You wanted a polo team and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand of the sides that have contested the high-goal tournaments in Argentina, England, the United States and the Gulf.

The tool is the simple part. Polo is one of the oldest games in the world, played on the Asian steppe two thousand years ago, and its modern professional form is organised on a principle that no other team sport uses.

Every player is worth a number of goals

Four players a side. Six periods, called chukkas, of seven and a half minutes each. That part is simple. Here is the part that is not.

Every registered polo player in the world carries a handicap, expressed in goals, running from minus two at the bottom to ten at the top. It is not a golf handicap; it does not describe how many goals you score. It is an assessment, made by national associations, of your total worth to a team. Add the four handicaps together and you have the team's rating, and tournaments are defined by that number. A twenty-two goal tournament means the four players' handicaps must total no more than twenty-two.

The consequence is that a team is assembled the way a football club assembles a wage bill, under a cap, and if you want one very great player you must surround him with lesser ones. Ten-goal players are so rare that at any given moment there are only around a dozen alive, and almost all of them are Argentine. When the tool draws you a team, its identity is really the sum of four numbers.

The horses are most of the sport

It is often said that the horse is seventy or eighty per cent of polo, and the players who say it are not being modest. They mean it as a technical claim.

A polo pony, which is not a pony at all but a small, fast, brave thoroughbred type, plays roughly one chukka before it is exhausted, so each player needs six to eight of them for a single match, and changes mount between every period. A high-goal professional therefore travels with a string of horses, grooms, vets and a lorry. The horses are trained to gallop into a collision, to stop dead from full speed, to turn on their hocks, and to accept a stick swinging past their eyes. They are worth vastly more than the equipment, and a great string can make a mediocre player competitive while a poor string will defeat a great one.

This is also why polo is the sport most tightly bound to money. The horses have to be bred, kept, transported and replaced, and nobody does that on a salary.

Why Argentina wins everything

Look at this list and you will find Argentine names everywhere: La Dolfina, Ellerstina, La Aguada, La Natividad, Coronel Suárez. This is not a coincidence of fashion. Argentina has dominated polo for a century in a way that no country dominates any other sport.

The reasons are the pampas, the horses and the culture. The land is flat, endless and cheap by the standards of England or California. The country breeds the best polo ponies on earth and exports them. And the game is played by people who grew up on horseback, in polo families, on estancias with their own fields. The Argentine Open, played at Palermo in Buenos Aires each winter, is the sport's Wimbledon, the only regular forty-goal tournament in the world, meaning all sixteen players on the field are near the ceiling of the handicap. Winning it matters more than any international fixture, which is why the great teams on this list measure themselves by it.

The cloned mare

And then there is Adolfo Cambiaso, who has been rated ten goals for most of his adult life and is generally accepted as the finest polo player who has ever lived, and who did something with his best horse that no other sport has an equivalent for.

Cuartetera was a mare of extraordinary quality. Rather than simply breed from her, Cambiaso had her cloned. Genetically identical copies were produced, raised, trained, and played in top-level competition, including in the Argentine Open, where he has ridden clones of the same horse in the same match, changing from one Cuartetera to another between chukkas. Cloned horses have been sold at auction for very large sums. There is no rule against it, the sport has largely shrugged, and it is difficult to think of another arena in which an athlete has responded to the mortality of a teammate by manufacturing more of her. Polo, quietly, is the most technologically radical sport on this site.

Why these team names keep changing

A practical caution about the list above. Polo teams are not clubs in the football sense. Most are assembled around a patron, an amateur player, usually wealthy, who funds the operation, plays in it, and names it after his estancia, his company or his sponsor.

Patrons come and go. Professionals move between teams season by season, sometimes tournament by tournament. A name that dominated the Argentine Open a decade ago may not exist now, and a new name may be the same four men under a different banner. La Dolfina and Ellerstina have endured, which is why they are the ones people know. Treat this list as a record of teams that have mattered, not as a current league table, and expect the entries to shift.

What a random polo team is good for

• Tournament sweepstakes. Draw teams for a group during the Argentine Open or the British high-goal season.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask how many horses a polo player uses in one match. Nobody guesses eight.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a team and go and watch a chukka, keeping your eye on the horses rather than the ball.
• Settling a debate. Pull two teams and argue the greater side, then discover you are really arguing about their handicaps.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a team and research the handicap system, which is a neat lesson in how sport handles inequality.

Polo questions

What is a polo handicap?

A rating of a player's total value to a team, from minus two goals to ten. The four players' handicaps are added to give the team's rating, and tournaments cap that total. Ten-goal players are extremely rare and mostly Argentine.

How many horses does a polo player need?

Six to eight for a single match. A pony plays roughly one chukka before tiring, so players change mount between every period. The horses are widely reckoned to account for most of a player's performance.

Why is Argentina so dominant?

Cheap flat land, the world's best polo pony breeding, and a horseback culture. The Argentine Open at Palermo is the only regular forty-goal tournament on earth and is the sport's most important prize.

Can I pull several teams, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. Federation of International Polo. fippolo.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, polo. britannica.com