I am upside-down on a stretch of bright green astroturf, encased in a plastic bubble.
I’ve just attempted, with delusions of balletic grace, to execute a sort of standing backflip – and now I’m stuck halfway. My feet kick the air helplessly. My arms and head are safely inside the bulbous tomb. I feel like a turtle someone has cruelly flipped. It’s only with a galvanic full-bodied thrust that I’m able to topple back over. And at that, I’m back to it: I keep playing soccer.
This is no ordinary soccer. It’s bubble soccer – soccer in a bubble, exactly as it sounds. The faux-sport has begun to make a name for itself around the world this year, somewhat inexplicably.
An article about its rise to prominence in Vice this March traced its origins to “an idea hatched by Norwegian comedians/television hosts Henrik Elvestad and Johan Golden in 2011” — precisely the sort of inauspicious beginnings you would expect of so bizarre a budding phenomenon.
This week, the first bubble soccer-dedicated facility in North America opened in Toronto. AT Soccer is the latest enterprise of Lazy Bros Entertainment, a company famously responsible for one of the city’s first “room-escape games” – a once-niche amusement trend that has grown more popular. The founders hope that bubble soccer will soon become the next leisure trend. “It’s already huge in Asia and Europe,” they explain to me on site. “But this is the first dedicated facility of its kind in Toronto.”
And it is quite a facility at that. The staggering 12,000-square-foot room – located way out on the northern edge of the city, more than an hour from downtown by bus and subway – looks like a spruced-up industrial warehouse, with space for two full-size bubble soccer pitches side by side and a smaller field nearby reserved for children. Each pitch can accommodate two teams of six bubble-wrapped adults. Once inside a bubble each adult is suddenly about five times their ordinary size.
I joined my wife at the facility for a one-on-one exhibition match. First we suited up. The process was quite simple: I rolled the donut-shaped bubble onto its side and squeezed and wiggled my way into the hole in its center. Then I slipped on a pair of shoulder straps, until it seemed as if I was wearing the bubble like a backpack. It felt like being inside a hamster ball, or one of those cage spheres from American Gladiators.
As for the game itself, bubble soccer more or less resembles traditional soccer, the obvious impediment notwithstanding. But the sport isn’t really the focus: crashing is. I bolted toward my wife and moved in for a light check. One tap and she went flying – off her feet and, with an almost audible boing, onto her bubble-protected back.
This is the joy of bubble soccer. Players can knock one another around like bumper cars. It was ludicrously fun with just the two of us on the pitch. With 12 players I have to assume it would be madness.
The founders of AT Bubble Soccer are well aware of the destructive impulse their game encourages. And they’re happy to indulge it, to a point. While the rules of the game strictly forbid “aggressive play” during a match – no attacking from behind, no checking into walls and so on – AT Bubble Soccer offers a number of alternative game modes that more directly emphasize physical contact. A sumo wrestling competition, for example, pits two bubbled players body to body in a bid to be the last man vertical. A challenge dubbed Chaos, meanwhile, sets a team of six on a race to the other side of the field – with another six headed in the opposite direction.
It didn’t take long for my wife and I to collapse in on our bubbles. All the bounding and bouncing was rather exhausting – quite a workout, all things considered. (“We’re planning on launching a fitness program with the bubbles,” the founders are quick to promise.) Slithering out of my inflatable shell, wheezing and gasping my way back to unprotected normality, I joked to my guide that he must be an expert in the art of bubble soccer by now. “Not me,” he confesses. “I’m a little scared of these things, to be honest.”
I can sympathize: there is something wildly incautious about rolling around a soccer field in a big ball of plastic. But after just an hour of bubbled acrobatics I was won over by the thrill. I wanted to smash into someone else again.
