By Freya Gerrard
Drone Soccer Uk was introduced to De Montfort university (DMU) this week with a taster session for students to take part.
The sport first introduced in South Korea in 2016 came to the UK last year and arrived at DMU on Monday(MAY19), with plans for it to return for a day session during Freshers Week in September.
Priya Kara, Marketing and Events Coordinator at De Montfort Students’ Union, said: “If you’re into Harry Potter they say it’s like quidditch but it’s in an inflatable arena and it’s two teams that play but the games only last about three minutes.
“There’s four people on each team and they play against each other to try to get the drone into the goal and that’s the concept of the game.
“It has never been in the UK as a sport but they want to make it bigger because they want to take teams back to Korea to have finals.
“They have actually got a final happening in June and they wanted to take a team but they haven’t yet got that far.”
The first world Championships was held in 2023 and the sport now involves France and the USA.
Priya said: “De Montfort is one of the first universities that they’re working with and after they showed us what it is like we thought it would be really good.
“We can probably get a society involved and if people are interested we can have a drone society as part of the university, we can create a team which can be part of UK but then is also linked to DMU.
“They’re coming back during freshers and doing a day session so hopefully they’ll carry on coming if they create a team because then they’ll train the players to become pro players instead of just playing for fun.
“The drones can break in these games if they bump into each other, but they always have backups and they’re easily fixed, from what they say. It’s like playing a video game but live.”
