Human Table Football Hire

Human Table Football turns the tabletop game into a full-size pitch you play standing up. People also call it human foosball, human table top football, or just five-a-side on poles, and it's the same idea as the little table game in the pub, scaled up so the players are the figures. Ours is the bars version, a green and blue inflatable branded HUMAN TABLE TOP FOOTBALL down the sides, with padded poles running across the pitch from one touchline to the other.

You line up along a pole, hang on to it, and can only move side to side, the same as the rods on a tabletop table. Two teams of five play head to head, up to ten on at once, with a real football and a goal mouth at each end. You can't run about chasing the ball, so it comes down to reading where the ball's going and getting your foot to it before the other lot do, with the four others on your pole either helping or getting in your way. It's as much fun to watch from the side as it is to play, which is half of why it does well where there's a crowd standing around.

Size, power and setup

• 50ft long x 30ft wide, so it wants a fair bit of room: a sports pitch, a big lawn, or a hall with the floor space
• Goes out on grass or hard standing outdoors, and indoors where the floor's clear and we can anchor it; we've set it up indoors in a glass-walled room, weighted down on sandbags
• Runs off one standard 13amp socket for the blower
• One of our staff comes with it and runs the game, so it's always supervised, not left for you to run yourself
• We bring the footballs

Works well at

It earns its keep where there's a crowd and a bit of competitive spirit: corporate fun days and team-building, school and college fun days, scout and youth groups, 18ths and birthday parties, and village fêtes and festivals. We've set it up at country-house and manor events, on some grand front lawns, on a college campus, and at multi-activity fun days alongside something like the bungee run. Football games like this get busier around the World Cup and the Euros, so it's worth booking early if your date falls near a tournament.

Mark G from the 3rd Emsworth Boys' Brigade hired it for a centenary event, along with a bouncy castle assault course and a bungee eliminator, and said "the kids loved them" and that everything was "put up exactly where we asked".

The two versions, and other football games

We run two human table footballs. This one is the bars version, where you hold a padded pole and slide along it. We've also got the ropes version, a bit smaller at 40ft x 20ft, where you're strapped to a rope instead of holding a bar. If you're filling a field with football, have a look at the penalty shootout, the giant velcro football, the football speed cage and the multi sports arena. The whole football games range is on one page, and it's a regular on our team-building and corporate bookings.

Human Table Football hire across Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and London

We've run Monster Event Hire from our unit in Havant since 2002, and the kit is all ours, so the person who turns up to set it up and run the game is one of our own staff and not a sub-contractor. They've passed the RPII operator and supervisor exams, are first-aid trained, and hold enhanced DBS certificates, which matters at a school or a youth group. Every inflatable is inspected once a year by our in-house RPII inspector under the PIPA scheme that the HSE recognises, and it's built to BS EN 14960:2019. It's a low unit so it doesn't catch the wind the way a tall slide does, but it still goes out with an anemometer and the same written procedure: a reading every half hour, and off use at 24mph. We carry £10 million public liability insurance, with the certificate and the risk assessment on request, and we hold additional licensed-premises cover, so there's no problem running it at a pub, club or bar.

We cover Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and London, including Havant, Portsmouth, Fareham and Southampton. Tell us the date, the venue and roughly how many you're expecting, and we'll put a quote together.