Random Water Polo Team Generator

So the tool gave you a water polo team

You wanted a water polo team and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It is a mixed pool: national sides, the great European clubs, and the American university programmes that dominate the sport in the United States.

The tool is the simple part. Water polo is the sport most people have watched for four minutes during an Olympics, decided looked a bit like handball, and switched away from. They were watching perhaps half of what was happening.

Nobody is touching the bottom

Start with the fact that governs everything. The pool is two metres deep at minimum, and a player may not touch the bottom or the sides. For four quarters of eight minutes, plus stoppages, plus overtime, every person in the water is holding themselves up using nothing but their legs, while also sprinting, wrestling, and throwing a ball with one hand.

They do it with a movement called the eggbeater kick, in which the legs rotate alternately in opposing circles, like a whisk. A good player can rise out of the water to the waist and hold that position while an opponent hangs off their arm. It is exhausting in a way that is genuinely difficult to convey through a television, because the camera shows you people who appear to be standing calmly in a pool. They are not standing. They have been treading water for half an hour, and a match will cover several kilometres of swimming, much of it a full-effort sprint. Nothing else in team sport is quite this demanding, and the sport's fitness is entirely invisible.

The half of the game the referee cannot see

Now the part that changes how you watch it. The referee stands on the deck. The water is opaque from above. Everything below the surface is, effectively, unpoliced.

What happens down there is a matter of legend within the sport and total ignorance outside it: grabbing, kicking, pulling of swimsuits, dragging people under, holding them there. Players emerge from matches with scratched backs and bleeding noses that nobody saw inflicted. Swimsuits are made deliberately tight and tear-resistant for reasons that need no elaboration. The rules recognise this reality: minor fouls are constant and produce a free throw, more serious ones exclude a player for twenty seconds, which is the sport's equivalent of a power play in ice hockey, and a brutal foul removes them entirely. Understanding that a water polo match is two games, one visible and one submerged, is the difference between finding it dull and finding it gripping.

Why Hungary

Look at the national teams in this list and one thing stands out. Water polo has been an Olympic sport since 1900, which makes it one of the oldest team events in the Games, and across that span the dominant nation has been Hungary, a landlocked country of under ten million people with no coastline whatsoever.

Hungary has won the Olympic tournament more times than any other nation, by a distance. The sport is woven into the country's identity in the way that ice hockey belongs to Canada. Around them cluster the rest of the elite, and the pattern is unmissable: Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Italy, Spain, Greece. Water polo is overwhelmingly a Mediterranean and central European sport, with the United States and Australia as the significant outsiders. If you were designing a sport from scratch you would probably not conclude that the country most suited to it would be one with no sea.

Blood in the water

And because Hungary is central to this sport, so is the most notorious match ever played in it.

In November 1956, Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising. Weeks later, at the Melbourne Olympics, Hungary met the Soviet Union in the semi-final. The Hungarian team had followed the fate of their country from a training camp in the hills, some of them not knowing whether their families were alive. The match was, predictably, violent. Hungary led 4-0. In the closing minutes a Soviet player struck the Hungarian Ervin Zádor and opened a cut above his eye, and Zádor climbed out of the pool with blood running down his face in front of a crowd of expatriate Hungarians who were ready to riot. Police cleared the poolside. The match was stopped early. Hungary went on to win the gold medal, and half of the team never went home. The photograph of Zádor's face went around the world, and the match has been called Blood in the Water ever since. It is the moment the sport is most famous for, and almost nobody who knows it could name a single rule of water polo.

Three kinds of team in one list

A word on what this tool is actually drawing from, because it is not one category. Some entries are national teams, which meet at the Olympics and the world championships. Some are European clubs, which contest their domestic leagues and the Champions League, and which is where the professional sport actually lives day to day. And some are American universities, because in the United States the elite level of water polo is collegiate, and the same handful of Californian institutions have been winning it for decades.

These are not ranked against each other and cannot be. Think of the list as a map of where the sport is played rather than a table of who is best. A random pull might give you a nation, a club or a university, and each of them belongs to a different competitive world.

What a random water polo team is good for

• Olympic sweepstakes. Draw teams for a group during the Olympic tournament, which is the sport's showpiece.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask which country has won the most Olympic water polo golds. Nobody guesses a landlocked one.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a team and go and watch a match knowing about the eggbeater kick and the exclusion foul. It transforms it.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a team and research the 1956 semi-final, which is a history lesson as much as a sports one.
• Settling a debate. Pull two nations and argue the greater water polo tradition.

Water polo questions

Can water polo players touch the bottom?

No. The pool is at least two metres deep and players may not touch the bottom or sides. They hold themselves up with the eggbeater kick, a whisking motion of the legs, for the entire match.

Which country is best at water polo?

Hungary, by a considerable distance, having won more Olympic titles than any other nation despite being landlocked. Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Italy, Spain and Greece make up most of the rest of the elite.

What was the Blood in the Water match?

The 1956 Olympic semi-final between Hungary and the Soviet Union, played weeks after Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising. It turned violent, a Hungarian player left the pool bleeding from the eye, and the match was stopped early with Hungary leading. They went on to win gold.

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 keyword the entry has to contain, which is handy for separating clubs from national sides.

References

1. World Aquatics. worldaquatics.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, water polo. britannica.com