An endless world championship
Handball is already living Gianni Infantino’s dream
By Till Erdenberger, Katowice
01/22/2023, 8:22 p.m
The Handball World Championship is a mega event: 112 games are played in just over two weeks. It’s about money and making new friends and powerful allies. Since the world association is like the greedy FIFA.
Do you remember the soccer World Cup in Qatar? Argentina became world champions on December 18 of last year after an exhilarating final, the best in the history of World Cup finals. The German team was eliminated in the preliminary round with shame and disgrace. When Lionel Messi was crowned king of the football world, the German stars had already been on vacation for two weeks.
It’s unimaginable in handball: Nobody is eliminated, nobody goes home early. Because 24 teams reach the main round after the preliminary round, the eight teams that didn’t make it play out the President’s Cup. It’s a kind of consolation round in which all the little ones in the handball world gather and play off the best of the rest.
In Poland and Sweden, a world championship with 32 teams will take place for the second time, compared to 24 teams before. The 2021 format celebrated its premiere in Egypt – the home of the powerful world association president Hassan Moustafa. Since then, 32 placements have been played out in an unbelievable 112 games. Four days before the new world champion is crowned, it is only clear who will come last.
“Not forever purely European”
Handball is historically a European sport, the continent provided all previous world champions. And probably also the coming ones. Only once has a non-European team reached the final: Qatar in 2015 at their home World Cup – with a team of European professionals who were lured with a lot of money and made playable for Qatar thanks to the loose rules of the world association.
And that’s a problem: “If you want to be safe in the Olympics in the long term, handball must not remain a purely European affair forever,” explains Bob Hanning, a long-time powerful official at the DHB, the largest handball association in the world. Moustafa knows that and the Egyptian also knows that there is more money to be made as his sport becomes more global, which has historically had to survive in the deep shadow of oversized football even in its core European market.
It is said that Moustafa, whom they call the “Pharaoh” not only because of his origins, runs his association as autocratically as possible. The 78-year-old has survived numerous scandals unimpressed, and he is in charge of arranging the major contracts himself. For the period from 2019 to 2025, the IHF has sold the rights to the World Championships and smaller tournaments to the marketer Lagardère Sports for more than 160 million euros. It is the largest marketing contract that the IHF has ever been able to conclude. People like to earn money in handball too.
Even if the sporting quality of the tournaments suffers: Sweden beat Uruguay 47:12 in the group phase, Germany’s left winger Rune Dahmke pointed out in an interview with ntv.de that at a World Cup “it’s really good that you can find your way around in the tournament with an opponent you definitely have the upper hand against”. No compliments for the mode. “There aren’t 32 teams that are good enough. There are too big differences between the good and the bad teams,” explained Croatia’s Luka Cindric. According to Norway star Sander Sagosen, it’s good that many nations are taking part in the Handball World Cup allowed, but at the same time the professional from THW Kiel also warned against too many one-sided preliminary round games.
“Better than if they hadn’t participated”
But it is just necessary lobbying that the handball world association has prescribed. It’s about money and friends, sport wants to be a world sport and has to be a world sport, with powerful allies in the Middle East or in the huge sports market in the USA. In the USA the Olympic Games will be held in 2028, until then the national team should gain international experience in order to be able to inspire their compatriots at home. Moustafa had already promised in 2018 “that the USA and their teams would receive a wild card at the 2025 and 2027 World Cup tournaments if they did not qualify.” At the current World Cup, the US boys celebrate their first victory at a handball world championship against Morocco – after 25 defeats before.
The 28:27 is enough to move into the intermediate round. There are three defeats, and it will be remembered above all that US professional Paul Skoruba is said to have bitten an opponent. But the one win, he ensured three more games at the highest level. “I do believe that this will draw a little attention to the very, very difficult America,” says Bob Hanning. “It definitely helps more than if you hadn’t participated at all.” With the Cape Verde Islands, there is a nation in the main round that was able to qualify for a World Cup for the first time in 2021 thanks to the large number of participants – and then had to leave again after a corona outbreak before the second game – against the two-time world champion Germany. It was simply not possible to order enough healthy players to go to Egypt in good time.
Endless games and a completely globalized sport in which even the smallest association still has a chance of a few minutes in the limelight – it is FIFA’s dream that the world football association will fulfill itself from 2026: For the first time there will even be 48 teams play their world champion, so far 16 groups with three teams each are planned, the last one is eliminated. A mammoth program that can hardly be managed logistically by one country alone: 2026 will be played in Canada, the USA and Mexico.
Increase brings FIFA many billions
The increase was ordered at FIFA in early 2017, shortly before the IHF. The big European federations don’t like the idea very much, but many small federations are extremely grateful to their big president for the prospect of being able to compete at a World Cup. Gratitude expressed in votes at Infantino’s election as FIFA President in 2016.
They don’t have to worry about their Olympic status in football, it doesn’t matter a bit in the multi-billion dollar business. Unlike handball and all the many small and micro associations, football doesn’t need the Olympics stage. FIFA likes to make money for this. For the World Cup in Qatar, revenue of seven billion dollars is expected, for the next tournament the world association was promised a profit of eleven billion dollars in 2018 by the organizers from Canada, the USA and Mexico. More games mean more money. Should one – as now brought into play by Infantino – stick to the mode with groups of four, the number of games would increase from 80 to 104. Even more money.
Handball players can only dream of such sums. 600 people watch in the Orlen Arena in Plock as Chile beats Saudi Arabia in the President’s Cup. But it’s also about giving old and new friends outside of Europe the feeling of being part of the handball world. And in the end, the penultimate player will have won at least one game.