What Is Teqball?
Teqball is a sport played on a specially designed curved table, where two players (or two pairs, in doubles) hit a football (or soccor ball for you yanks) back and forth with any part of their body except their hands and arms. It looks a little like table tennis played with a soccer ball, and that's no accident. The whole game was built around one simple idea: make football training feel like a game you can play on a table.
The rules are deliberately small: three touches per side, no touching the ball with the same body part twice in a row, and no hands. Winner is the first to 12 points out of the best-of-three sets. Because the table curves upward on both ends, the ball almost always returns to the player — which means longer rallies and far fewer broken ankles chasing stray balls than you'd get on a flat table.
How It Started
Teqball was born in the early 2010s in Hungary. The origin story starts with Gábor Borsányi, a former professional footballer who had spent years kicking a ball around on a table tennis table for fun and training. The problem was obvious: a flat table sends the ball flying off in every direction after one bounce.
So Borsányi teamed up with businessman Viktor Huszár and computer scientist György Gattyán to solve it. Their answer was the curved table that keeps the ball in play and makes the game endlessly repeatable. They patented the table, and the sport of teqball was officially presented in 2014 in Budapest, Hungary.
The name comes from “TEQ,” the brand prefix the founders used across their sports innovations, with “-ball” tacked on to signal its football roots.
How It Gained Popularity
Teqball's growth was unusually fast for a brand-new sport, and it followed a clever playbook.
1. Win over the football world first
Instead of pitching teqball to the general public, the founders went straight to professional football clubs. The curved table turned out to be a near-perfect training tool: it sharpens first touch, ball control, and reflexes without the impact of a full pitch session. Within a few years, the tables showed up at the training grounds of some of the biggest clubs on earth: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester City, Manchester United, Paris Saint-Germain, and Bayern Munich.
Once pro players started posting teqball rallies on social media, the sport had a built-in marketing engine. Short, satisfying clips of keepy-uppy style rallies traveled further than any traditional federation could afford to push.
2. Build a real federation
The International Teqball Federation — FITEQ — was founded in 2015, the year after the sport's public debut. FITEQ did the unglamorous work that lets a “game” become a “sport”: standardized rules, an anti-doping program, coaching and refereeing certifications, and a clear competitive calendar.
3. Run a world championship early
FITEQ did something most new federations avoid: it held a World Championship while the sport was still tiny. The first took place in Budapest in 2017. The strategy created instant legitimacy, gave players a goal, and produced footage the federation could use to recruit the next wave of national federations.
4. Collect ambassadors and federations
Teqball signed high-profile ambassadors (the most famous being Brazilian icon Ronaldinho) who became a face of the sport along with other notable footballers. Meanwhile FITEQ worked to establish national federations on every continent, reaching well over 100 of them within a decade.
5. Aim for recognition
In 2017, teqball was officially recognized by the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) as a full sport — a meaningful milestone for an activity that, just three years earlier, had been an idea being bounced around a Budapest workshop. FITEQ also began building relationships with continental associations and the Olympic movement, with the long-term goal of getting teqball onto the Olympic program.
Teqball's Status Today
A decade-plus after its launch, teqball sits in an unusual spot: it's a young sport with genuine institutional backing, real global reach, and a passionate community, but it's not yet a household name the way tennis or volleyball is.
The competitive circuit
FITEQ runs an annual Teqball World Championships and a season-long international circuit. Play exists across categories: men's and women's singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, which keeps the calendar busy and gives many nations a path to a medal.
The clubs and the grassroots
The professional-football training use case remains teqball's biggest visibility channel, and the tables are increasingly common beyond the training-pitch bubble in sports clubs, hotels, beach resorts, schools, and community spaces. The compact, weatherproof table makes teqball unusually portable compared to most competitive sports.
Toward the Olympics
FITEQ has been openly chasing Olympic inclusion. The federation has met the International Olympic Committee's governance requirements, grown its continental reach, and pushed the mixed-doubles format, which fits the modern Olympic appetite for gender-balanced, TV-friendly competition. Whether teqball lands on a future Olympic program is still an open question, but the federation has positioned the sport as a serious candidate rather than a novelty.
The culture
Beneath the federation and the pro clubs, teqball has developed the thing every sport eventually needs: a culture. There are regional tournaments, a recognizable play style, rivalries in doubles, and a community of players who treat the table the way a skater treats a halfpipe or a climber treats a crag. It's a place to test skill, hang out, and get a little better every time.
Try It Yourself
You don't need a federation membership to start. All you need is a football and a curved table (or, in a pinch, a willingness to chase balls on a flat one). Curious whether teqball or another hobby suits you? Take a hobby quiz on Avid Enthusiast and explore related ball-sports hobbies in our collection.