At first glance it might seem to be a pretty big stretch to think Barack Obama’s recent election victory will have any impact on Team Handball in the United States. In all likelihood, President-Elect Obama probably doesn’t even know the sport exists. https://teamhandballnews.com/news.php?item.483

But a President Obama could play a major role in the single most important event upcoming for USA Team Handball in several years. This event is the IOC Congress next October in Copenhagen at which the 116 members of the IOC will vote to decide which city will host the 2016 Olympics. Should that city be Chicago, USA Team Handball will not only automatically qualify for the Olympics, it would also benefit from multiple marketing and fundraising opportunities.

And Barack Obama could very well be the X factor that puts Chicago over the top of Rio de Janeiro, Madrid and Tokyo. Politics is not supposed to play a role in the selection of host city, but it would be foolish not to think that the United States ongoing war in Iraq along with George Bush’s lack of popularity around the world was at least some factor in New York’s non selection in 2005 for the 2012 games.

New York’s non-selection wasn’t a surprise, but London’s victory over Paris was. Many have attributed it to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s schmoozing with IOC members in the 48 hours preceding the vote. With only 116 people to engage with personality and political skills can be vital in swaying a few critical votes your way. Even simple gestures can have an impact. One such gesture was Vladamir Putin’s address in English to the IOC which helped get Sochi selected for the 2014 Winter Games.

No matter what your political leanings are you can’t help but walk away from a Barack Obama address without being impressed by his eloquence and ability to communicate. Nothing against the leaders of Brazil, Japan and Spain, but if Obama shows up in Copenhagen to push for Chicago’s candidacy it will not be a fair fight. The rest of the World is already celebrating his victory and I can already visualize the IOC members posing for pictures with the inspirational Obama.

A lot, of course, can happen in a year and there are other issues such as the USOC’s share of Olympic revenues that might prevent a Chicago Olympics. It’s never over till it’s over, but in my view it’s time to start drawing up the 8 year plan for USA Team Handball.

BBC Sport: “Chicago Olympic Hopes in the Balance”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/mihirbose/2008/10/chicagos_olympic_hopes_in_the.html
BBC Sport: “London Beats Paris to 2012 Games”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/front_page/4655555.stm

For the geographically challenged, Tórshavn is the capital of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago north of Scotland which is an independent nation in some respects and part of Denmark in others. In other words, the Faroe Islands (population: 48,000) are to the European Handball Federation what Greenland is to the Pan-American Handball Federation (PATHF). Except in this case the Faroes have little chance of rocking the boat in taking qualification spots for the World Championships from other nations in the much stronger EHF.

Geography aside, the news story here is the EHF’s dramatic change to its qualification format for the Euro 2010 Championship in Vienna. For prior competitions the EHF has used a two tiered format for qualification. On the top tier were the European sides that had qualified for the preceding World Championships and on the bottom tier were everybody else. While the top tier European teams were playing at the World Championships (the preceding January) the remaining teams in the bottom tier would play group round robins to whittle their number down.

For 2008 qualification, 26 nations played in 7 preliminary groups to shrink their number down to 12 teams. Those 12 teams were than combined with the bottom 6 European teams from the World Championship. That pool of 18 teams was then drawn into 9 pairings for 2 game aggregate playoffs. Those 9 winners joined the 5 best European teams from the World Championships, the defending champion and the host nation to fill out the 16 team field. Kind of complicated and much simpler for the top tier teams to qualify.

This time around the format is much simpler. The host (Austria) and the defending champion (Denmark) automatically qualify. Everybody else (36 nations) was drawn into 7 groups where they will play a home and away double round robin. The top 2 nations in each group head to Vienna, while the rest stay home. The games will be played over 10 designated match dates with the first 2 rounds taking place on October 29-30 and November 1-2 . In total there will be 10 rounds with the last matches taking place in the middle of June.

[b]Score one for the little guys[/b]

This change significantly increases the number of qualifying matches for the elite nations and gives smaller nations like the Faroe Islands multiple opportunities to host much larger nations in season long double round robin competition. Yes, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, Bosnia and Italy will be making the journey to tiny Torshavn. So far, it’s been rough for the Faroes as they lost to Serbia 41-20 in and to Bosnia, 45 -28. Not good, but much better than the 42-11 shellacking Germany put on Bulgaria. Expect to see a lot of scores in that vein, but also expect to see some morale victories like tiny Luxembourg’s 30-21 loss against Olympic Champion’s France. Against a side entirely composed of amateurs, France only led 15-13 at halftime.

But, the key words here are “morale victory”, as the nature of Handball means that it’s virtually impossible for a hopelessly overmatched squad to put together the 60 minutes of Handball necessary to actually win. In soccer, however it’s a different story. The new handball qualification format is nearly identical to the European soccer qualification format and nations like Luxembourg and the Faroe Islands have beaten or tied larger nations. Readers to this website already know that I am not a fan of soccer, but even I can appreciate the novelty of a small nation like the Faroe Islands challenging a big nation. While I lived in France, the Faroes were drawn into a group with France and my curiosity was such that I made a special point of seeing the match. They hung with the French for a little bit by putting all 11 players in the box, but once 1 goal was scored the floodgates opened. With handball you can only put 1 guy in front of the goal, so no such similar strategy is possible.

[b]Why the new format? [/b]

It’s fairly obvious that the new format is attempting to copy the success of the very popular soccer qualification system that has been in place for many years in Europe for both the European and World Championships. These soccer matches are usually sell-outs as soccer is wildly popular and these matches have huge ramifications. Just ask England which failed to qualify for Euro 2008.
In a recent newsletter EHF President Tor Lian replied thusly to a question concerning the format:

“ There had been in depth discussions on this matter for some years and as is the case in any democracy, there were obviously differing opinions on the path we should take. Many countries were asking for more national team activities and top class international matches at home – the success of the national team is important for the growth of any sport. The nations wanted to give their fans a chance to see their national team in action more often, this system allows this. We also had reached a point where we wanted to take the development of the EURO product one step further.”

But, while this rational makes sense, it’s not clear whether the interest in Handball will support the new extended format. Additionally, the clubs at some point will surely speak more forcefully about the additional games and the additional risks to their players. The clubs aren’t entirely happy about major tournaments like the World Championships and the Olympics. How happy are they going to be if a top player has a season ending injury in Torshavn? Already, some of the National sides have sent less than 100% full strength sides due to players choosing to rest nagging injuries rather than risk aggravating injuries. Part of the reason, Luxembourg was able to hang with the French for awhile was that Karabatic and the Gille brothers didn’t play due to injuries. I’m guessing that if Kiel had been scheduled to play Hamburg on Thursday they all would have played.

Also unmentioned, is that this format seems to conflict with all the noise the EHF has made about the need to change the World Championships to a once every 4 year events. Really, if you’re complaining about too many games for elite players, adding an extended qualification format doesn’t make much a whole lot of sense.

For all of these reasons it remains to be seen if the new format will stick and the EHF has indeed emphasized that it as experiment. Based on input from all involved the EHF will assess whether this format will continue in the years to come.

Faroe Islands soccer team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islands_national_football_team
Summary of first and second scores are here: http://www.eurohandball.com/ech/men/2010/round/2/Qualification
EHF-euro website: “Small miracle in Luxembourg”: http://www.ehf-euro.com/aut2010/news/singe-news/article/small-miracle-in-luxembourg.html
Euro 2010 Newsletter with entire EHF President interview on the new format: http://cms.eurohandball.com/ResourceImage.aspx?raid=5773

If you’ve checked out the USA Team Handball website lately, www.usateamhandball.org you’ve undoubtedly noticed more activity of late. After a slow start the new federation is doing a much better job in terms in getting the word out and reporting on handball events in the U.S. I won’t repeat in detail all the news they’ve reported on in the past few weeks, but it includes several stories on new staff hires, the Chicago tournament and the Women’s team plans to participate in the Division 1 Pan American Team Handball Federation (PATHF) tournament in Mexico in November.

The best product to date was the recent first issue of the USA Team Handball Newsletter. The 6 page full color newsletter includes news, photos and a handball tips section. The newsletter can be viewed online at http://usateamhandball.org/tracker/?e=dchandball%40yahoo.com&u=573&s=3&t=url&d=http%3A%2F%2Fusateamhandball.org.ismmedia.com%2FISM3%2Fstd-content/repos/Top/usateamhandballnews1.pdf or you can sign up for email delivery at http://usateamhandball.org/registration/.

The terms “professional athlete” or “professional contract” appear from time to time on this website as well as national federation sites. To the uninitiated, particularly young Americans, being a professional athlete might conjure an image of playing in packed arenas with adoring fans and lucrative contracts. One needs, however, to take a closer look at the definition of professional before jumping to that conclusion.

According to Merriam-Webster a professional is defined as someone who “Participates for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs.”

And if you break down this definition, you’ll see that “gain or livelihood” is not quantified. In other words, if someone pays you 1 dollar or buys you lunch to play Handball for them, then by definition you are a professional Handball athlete. In fact, using this definition, almost everyone who has ever played for the USA National team was a professional. Albeit a poorly paid one, but a professional. The same is true, as well, for the British Handball athletes currently training in Denmark. For that matter, every collegiate athlete on scholarship in the U.S. is a professional using the strict definition. Their compensation for playing is the tuition and the room/board provided by the scholarship. The NCAA may claim amateur status, but for the major collegiate sports, in particular, the athletes are really amateur in name only.

A “professional contract” changes the definition and context somewhat. With a contract, a player is clearly getting monetary compensation from a private club and there is no collegiate or national team aspect so the allusion of amateur status is gone entirely. But again being a professional is simply a matter of some compensation being provided, whether it be $1 or $1,000,000. Or in an American context, a minor league class A and a Major League Baseball player are both “professionals” they just have dramatically different salaries.

The same is also true in European Handball Leagues, in that there is different compensation for different levels. But signing a contract for a single A baseball team and a low level handball club are two dramatically different things. Primarily, this is because European sports are not organized differently. First off, the overall structure is more graduated with more divisions (sometimes as many as 7 levels) between the lowest amateur teams and the highest professional teams. Secondly, the European norm is to provide compensation to players at a much lower level of play than one could expect with an American club.

This is one of the reasons why you’ll see many former NCAA basketball players with no real prospect of ever playing in the NBA playing at all levels in Europe. Some are drawing great salaries at the higher levels, decent salaries at middle levels and next to nothing at the lowest levels. And Handball in Europe doesn’t have the cachet that Basketball does, so those salaries/compensation would be even lower by comparison.

I’ve tried to extrapolate the salaries in Europe https://teamhandballnews.com/news333.html
before, but it’s a lot of guesswork due to the lack of information provided. My educated guess is that you don’t have to go very far down in the league structures in the various nations to see levels of compensation drop significantly below the median income for the nation in question. And a little farther down the pecking order, calling yourself a professional athlete, is a real stretch from an American point of view.

But, the point of this diatribe was not to belittle the fact that someone has or is playing professionally in Europe. The fact that some club values a player enough to compensate them in some fashion is a significant statement of that player’s capabilities. The point that I wanted to make instead is that being a professional athlete in Europe is not the same as being a professional athlete in the U.S. Just something to take into context when somebody says they were a professional handball player in the Elbonian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbonia League for 8 years.