In the series, Quidditch is portrayed as a dangerous but popular sport played by witches and wizards riding flying broomsticks.

Matches are played on a large oval pitch with three ring-shaped goals of different heights on each side, between two opposing teams of seven players each: three Chasers, two Beaters, the Keeper, and the Seeker.

A major motif of five of the Harry Potter books is the competition among the four Hogwarts houses for the Quidditch Cup each school year; in particular, the rivalry between Gryffindor and Slytherin.

In 2014, Rowling started publishing a series of match reports from the Quidditch World Cup on Pottermore, culminating in a short story about the final featuring the return of Harry, Ron, Hermione and their friends as adults.

In Chamber of Secrets, Lucius Malfoy buys a full set of the more advanced Nimbus 2001s for the Slytherin team as a bribe, so they would choose his son Draco as Seeker that year.

Harry receives a Firebolt model from his godfather, Sirius Black, after his Nimbus 2000 is destroyed during a Quidditch match in Prisoner of Azkaban.

A storefront near Ollivanders Wand Shop is themed as a Quidditch supply with a Golden Snitch on the sign and a case containing animated Quaffle and Bludgers surrounded by Beaters' bats.

[14] This view has been disputed by Mimi R. Gladstein, who points to the presence of female players on the victorious Irish team at the Quidditch World Cup.

"[15] On the other hand, D. Bruno Starrs notes Quidditch's rarity as a sport in which males and females compete against each other, and describes it as "levelling" the genders.

[18] In the real world, the word "Quidditch", long predating Harry Potter, occurs in some English placenames, and seems to come from Anglo-Saxon cwǣð-dīc = "mud-ditch".

[19] In November 2014, a plaque appeared outside the entrance of Bristol Children's Hospital attesting that the famous hooped sculptures which stand in front of the paediatric institution are, in fact, not a 50-foot-tall (15 m) interactive installation inaugurated in 2001, but instead the goalposts used in the 1998 Quidditch World Cup.

Oxford Dictionaries associate editor Charlotte Buxton explained that Quidditch had gained recognition beyond the books, pointing to its existence as a real-life sport.

According to the International Quidditch Association, the current international governing body of the sport, the original rules and regulation of the popular collegiate sport known as quidditch were formed "... on a sunny Sunday afternoon in 2005 by Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe, students at Middlebury College in Vermont, US".