Does Quidditch Explain the (Harry Potter) World?

Last quarter, the Undergraduate English Association sponsored a Harry Potter speaker panel on campus. One of the things that came up was the role of the sport, Quidditch, in the fictional world. Why am I mentioning this? In class, Edwards brought up that Foer in “How Soccer Explains the World” did not really delve into any real-time, experiential study/explanation of playing soccer. Foer made claims to its socialist themes, but did not specify how this would be evident in the game itself. Now, one of the professors in the Harry Potter forum raised the question of why Rowling bothered to spend so much time writing about Quidditch. The professor wondered if going on and on about the kids and teachers discussing the sport, and also detailed accounts of practicing and playing it, was necessary at all to the story. Was it a distraction from the magical education or the plot with the bad guy? The responses to this proposal and the discussion that followed were interesting and in some way relate to question of whether an experiential account of a sport is crucial to understanding its importance.

One student actually responded that not only is Quidditch not a distraction in the HP world, but it actually quite central in a “Quidditch explains the HP world” kind of way. From a Foer approach, Quidditch is the sport that the magical folk of every nation compete in. It is analogous to soccer, with its Word Cup tournament that nearly every wizard and witch (no matter how rich or poor) wants to (and mostly does) attend and its hooligans from each team.
And in fact when the ‘bad guys’ wanted to harm wizards, they attacked the Word Cup because of its significance to the spirit of the wizarding world.

Anyway, people have forums and forums of analyzing Quidditch I know, and I’m not going to go on with this. But I do want to make my point. While was I wasn’t originally convinced in class, comparing soccer to Quidditch and the world to the HP world, I do think Foer’s accont would have greatly benefited from a greater focus on the sport. While I’m often bored reading the Quidditch scenes and want to hurry up and get to the plot in HP, Quidditch is part of the plot and always is so – even in its importance to the main character when he is banned from it, a true exile from what it is to be a wizard in the wizarding world.