When teqball, a dynamic mashup of soccer and ping-pong, makes its debut at the Asian Games this week, it will mark the biggest international milestone yet for a quirky sport that was born less than 15 years ago as a project between two neighbors in a garage in Hungary.
Teqball is one of the world’s fastest growing sports. It was created in 2014 and the international federation, FITEQ, was established in 2017.
Now, teqball is arriving at the Asian Games, the world’s second largest multisport event after the Olympics, on an upward trajectory that its cofounders, Viktor Huszar, Gabor Borsanyi and Gyorgy Gattyan, hope carries it to the Olympics one day.
“Super proud,” Huszar told The Japan Times about the sport’s inclusion in the upcoming Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, which officially begin on Saturday. The teqball competition will start before the opening ceremony and run from Sept. 17 to Sept. 20 at Nagoya City Higashi Sports Center.
“It’s like when you are raising a child, and your child is graduating,” Huszar said. “For us, teqball is a child. It’s such an amazing legacy in our lives as well. The Asian Games are like the Asian Olympics. It’s bigger than the Olympics. So teqball being part of it as an official sport, seeing, from all over the Asian continent, countries playing … proud is not the right word. We are beyond proud.”
Teqball is a blend of soccer and ping-pong that is played with a regulation-sized soccer ball on a curved table with a plastic divider in the middle.
Before the game had a name, Huszar used to describe it as “like curved ping-pong football.”
Players, competing in either singles or doubles matches, can hit the ball with any part of their body except the hands. The players can touch the ball up to three times before returning it to the opposing side — players in doubles matches must make at least one pass to a teammate before hitting a return – but cannot make consecutive touches with the same body part.
Similar to ping-pong or tennis, points are scored when one side fails to hit a legal return or commits an infraction.
The format can lead to rallies featuring inventive and acrobatic moves, from headers to bicycle kicks.
“It’s the purified action (of soccer), and I think it’s just fast paced, much faster,” Huszar said. “What’s the best moment in football? When there’s a nice dribble, a nice goal, or when it’s a bicycle kick. I think all that action is packed into a very short time.
“And life has changed, nowadays it’s social media, TikTok, one-minute videos, it’s these kinds of highlights. That’s what happens in teqball.”
The sport is the result of a pair of friends trying to have fun.
Neighbors Huszar, a military engineer, and Borsanyi, a former pro soccer player, found that life (work, family issues, etc.) kept getting in the way when they tried to organize 11-on-11 pickup soccer matches.
So they came up with a soccer game that needed fewer people and less space. After first playing on a concrete ping-pong table, they realized the surface needed to be curved to help direct the ball to players’ feet, which led to the creation of the sport’s signature curved table.
From that humble beginning, the sport now boasts over 150 teqball federations around the world, and the cofounders are hopeful of recognition from the International Olympic Committee and one day being part of the Olympic program.
The Asian Games could be the perfect opportunity to showcase teqball, as Asian players, especially those from Thailand, are among those adding new levels of technique to the sport.
“The level of development, that’s astronomic,” Huszar said. “The original gameplay, which at the time was super difficult and exciting for us, it is so much more now. The only way to compare it is to see the original videos from back in 2012 and now see how these Asian players are playing.”
Huszar said the biggest surprise to him is the number of ways players have come up with to control and return the ball.
“They have introduced so many different touches to the game,” he said. “So that is what surprises me: every time I see some new tactical move or some physically impossible move that we never thought of.”
There will be five medals up for grabs in teqball at the Asian Games in men’s and women’s singles and doubles and in mixed doubles.
Yuina Sakamoto may be one of 91AV原创 best hopes of claiming a medal on home soil.
Sakamoto, who is No. 7 in the current women’s singles world rankings, claimed 91AV原创 first world championship medal by earning bronze in 2025.
“In Japan, of course, it’s a new sport, but we do have a Japan Teqball Federation,” Huszar said. “And I think they are going to get a medal (at the Asian Games). At the last World Cup, the singles player in the women’s category got a medal. So they are playing well.”
The sport prioritizes technique, and many soccer players use it for training, something that really skyrocketed when players were stuck at home during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soccer players have greatly helped the spread of the sport, with videos of stars like Lionel Messi and Neymar playing teqball popping up across social media. Former Brazil great Ronaldinho is a global ambassador. Some soccer clubs, including Manchester United and Chelsea, have set up tables in their facilities.
“All of them playing it and also sharing it on social media, and the national teams during the World Cup sharing it, this is the boost,” Huszar said. “I think more and more people in the world know the curved ping-pong table.”
Huszar hopes that familiarity continues to grow as people see more highlights from teqball matches.
“It’s probably a social media sport in that sense that the action is what people are looking for,” he said. “And I think football is the most popular sport in the world. So whoever plays football?likes teqball immediately, because they understand the level of skill required to play at this level.”
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