Sports, specifically Quidditch, play an important role in the Wizarding world, and in the Harry Potter series. Quidditch is a team sport played up in the air on brooms. Wizards all around the globe fanatically follow it in a similar manner to football, and the Quidditch World Cup is a major event on the wizard calendar.

Not long into his first year at Hogwarts, Harry proves himself a talented Quidditch player and is named to the Gryffindor team as its Seeker, with the role of finding and catching the Golden Snitch. His activities on the Quidditch pitch feature prominently in several of the books. Lee Jordan, two years older than Harry, serves as the commentator for the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts until he graduates. The sport appears in every book except the seventh; school matches are canceled in the fourth due to the need to use the pitch for the Triwizard Tournament, but Harry attends the Quidditch World Cup as a guest of the Weasley family.

Other wizard games and sports include Gobstones (a version of marbles in which the stones squirt foul-smelling liquid into the other player's face when they lose a point), Exploding Snap (a card game in which the cards explode), and Wizard Chess (in which the pieces are sentient and under the command of the player). The wizarding world is also home to a number of other wizard spectator sports, such as Creaothceann (a now-banned broom game from Scotland in which players try to catch rocks with cauldrons strapped to their heads), Quodpot (a popular game in the United States involving a Quaffle that explodes), and broom racing.