Where’s the USA Team Handball fan? (Hint: There’s one in Southern Nevada)

In Part 4, I pointed out that one factor limiting sponsor funding was the reality that there are very few followers of Team Handball in the U.S. In Part 5 I try to explain why there are so few and why this is such a big reason for the sports lack of success.   (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Well, pretty much every American who’s ever been involved with the sport knows that it’s a little known sport in this country, but how “little known” is it.  Over the years I’ve addressed this from a number of different angles.  For the benefit of new readers, however, I’ll rehash the basic issues.  First, though, I’ll try to quantify the problem a bit.

Just how lacking is this “lack of awareness?”

Despite some positive inroads and gains over the 25 years or so that I’ve followed the sport, the reality is that the footprint for Team Handball in the U.S. is extremely small.  How extremely small?  Well, without the benefit of a sophisticated survey it’s pretty tough to definitively qualify the sport’s popularity and awareness quotient.  Lacking that survey, I’ve put together some numbers based on personal experience, informed speculation and extrapolation.

Basic Awareness

I’ll define basic awareness as anyone who when asked could give a short simple explanation of the sport.  I suspect that if a poll were taken you would get probably around 5% of Americans to pass that basic test.  This may seem overly pessimistic to some American Team Handball followers because they’ve preached the gospel to virtually every friend and acquaintance in their life.  And as a sports fan you’re also likely hanging out with fellow sports fans who are more likely to pass the basic awareness test.  For instance, if you were to conduct a survey at a sports bar you could probably get a 25% response.  Ask the right expat community in New York, you might get 75%.  But, at a random chruch or a concert hall, you might be lucky to get 1 in a 100.  The timing of such a survey would also skew the results.  With the Olympics still fresh in more people’s minds, you could maybe bump up the average to 10% or more, but as the Olympics fades into memory the casual fan might forget the few minutes that he perused a couple of years ago while flipping through the channels on his TV.

A necessary diatribe on semantics

There are a number of reasons behind this low awareness quotient, but one of the biggest reasons is the existence of another, unrelated sport sharing the same name, “Handball.”  For the benefit of our readers, not living in the U.S, Canada, Ireland and Australia, this other Handball sport can best be described as “racquetball with your hands.”   And without question this “Handball” is more well known and popular in these countries.  While it’s easy to dismiss this as a minor semantics issue it has undoubtedly hurt the development and marketing of the sport in the U.S.  On a basic level it creates a remarkable amount of confusion and always requires a short diatribe to explain the sport.

In a broader context it hampers the “branding” of the sport in the consciousness of Americans.  If you consider that companies often spend millions of dollars figuring out what to name a product in the hopes that consumers will remember that product you get a sense that this little semantic problem is really a big one with no simple solution.

Well, theoretically there is a simple solution in that an entirely new name could be christened for the sport.  And this has been done halfway in the U.S. with the addition of the “Team” in Team Handball.  Unfortunately, this only half solved the problem as the name still causes more confusion then distinction.  And other names have been used.  In some parts of Canada the sport is referred to as E.T.H. European Team Handball as a further modifier and in Ireland it’s referred to as Olympic Handball.  I like the Irish name for it immediate conjures up the Olympic Games, but I’m not so sure as to whether the protective USOC would allow the use of the Olympic name.  A more radical solution would be to come up with an entirely new name like Goalball, but then that would create a whole host of new problems like the marketing that would be required.  Not to mention the resistance that would surely follow from traditionalists that can stand even the “Team” modifier.

If your sport isn’t on TV it doesn’t matter

Aside from the semantics problems there are a number of other issues related to so few people even knowing the sport exists.  As was touched upon previously, the dominance of basketball in the U.S. has made it tougher for a similar indoor sport to gain traction.  There is also a tremendous dearth when it comes to stories in the press, which is why it’s always a cause for minor celebration in the USA Team Handball community when some reporter writes a nice story on the sport in a major newspaper.  Without question, though, the lack of TV broadcasts is the biggest reason behind the sports low awareness quotient.

During the 2008 and 2012 Olympics I’ve seen the impact of TV first hand as the traffic to our website increases by leaps and bounds.  Here’s one anecdote for you.  During the MSNBC broadcast of a women’s match between Sweden and Denmark on the first day of the Olympics I watched our current unique visitors jump from 20 to 370 in the space of 15 minutes.  So that means that roughly 350 Americans sitting on their couch grabbed their iPad or their laptop and typed “Team Handball” into Google and clicked on the link for Team Handball News.  And those are just the individuals with that level of curiosity.  Thousands more undoubtedly checked out other websites or simply watched this “new” sport for the first time.  And this is on MSNBC, a network that normally shows news that is temporarily hijacked during the Olympics every four years.   We could argue about whether the basic awareness of the sport is 2%, 5% or 8%, but I don’t think anyone would argue that broadcasts like this caused this number to jump significant amounts

1 in a million:  The need for real fans and real awareness

But, increasing “basic awareness” is just the first battle to be fought.  If the sport is to truly grow and develop in this country the sport needs more real fans.  And this is where the title of this article comes into play.  The number of really devoted fans and athletes of the sport in the U.S. is an incredibly small number.   There are a few metrics and anecdotes that bear this out pretty starkly:  USA Team Handball membership has hovered around the 300-500 mark for decades.  The collegiate championship for several years has featured only 3 or 4 schools.   (And often West Point accounts for 2 of the teams.)  Tryouts/selections for national teams, particularly at younger levels sometimes involves simply finding any players.  Club championships in recent years have become more and more an Expat convention with native born Americans in the minority.

All of these anecdotes lead to my conclusion, that in the U.S. there are maybe around 300 real fans of the sport.  Somebody, who when asked, “Hey, what’s your favorite sport?” without hesitation replies Team Handball.  As the U.S. population is moving in on the 312 million mark, I’ll put the number at 312, so the devoted few can proudly claim they are 1 in a million.

The impact of this stark reality hardly needs explanation.  How can the U.S. expect to field quality teams with such a small talent pool to work with?  How can the U.S. attract big sponsorship deals when such a deal results in minimal exposure?  As I’ve pointed out in this series the U.S. has a lot of challenges, but this lack of awareness is probably as close as there is to a root problem.  If this problem is fixed then more funding and finding/developing better players will become far more easier.  Yes, step one is changing 1 in 1,000,000 to 1 in a 100,000 and then 1 in 10,000.

So that quantifies the extent of the problem in terms of awareness.  And, of course, it begs the question, why isn’t more being done to fix it.  In Part 6, I’ll further address the struggle and challenges involved with with getting the sport on TV more.

If only it were so easy to get substantial funding from these sources.

In part 3, I provided an overview of USA Team Handball’s funding since 1993 and some background as to why the USOC has decreased funding since the 96 Olympics.  Continuing with the theme of funding sources, in this part I look at why the sport hasn’t received much in terms of funding from sponsors and donors.   (Links to Part 1, Part 2)

Sponsors:  As the concept of a “sponsor” might mean different things to different people, I’ll define it as any company that contributes funding to USA Team Handball for the promotion of their product.  (Note:  This is significantly different from the concept of a donor (discussed later) for which there is nothing expected in kind.)

Companies with Handball Specific Products:  There are a number of products that are directly related to the sport of Team Handball.  The obvious products include balls, goals, nets, flooring, shoes and stickum.  Companies with make these products have an incentive to sponsor USA Team Handball since the use and promotion of these products by the Federation is pretty much guaranteed to reach almost everyone in the U.S. that would consider buying these products.  Over the years, USA Team Handball had had a number of sponsorship agreements with companies that make these products, but I don’t have access to the documentation which shows how substantial these agreements were.  In recent years, USA Team Handball did score a $50,000 sponsorship deal with SnapSports (a maker of floor courts), but I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if in most instances the primary benefit was simply equipment being provided for national team use.  (Side note:  Another item, worthy of a lengthy discussion are TV rights and that will be covered in the next installment.)

So, first the good news:  USA Team Handball can pitch to these potential advertisers its phenomenal market reach.  Seriously, if you advertise on USA Team Handball’s webpage, you are probably going to reach nearly 100% of the U.S. Handball market.  But, now the bad news:  The number behind that 100% is probably in the neighborhood of around 500 people.  If these companies do the math, and they generally have people that really do the math (if they want to stay in business), this means that the dollar figures behind these sponsorships isn’t going to currently amount to much.

Companies with Sports Related Products:  There are a number of sports related products not specific to Team Handball that also might find merit with a sponsorship relationship with USA Team Handball.  The most obvious item is team uniforms, but other items such as protective undergarments could come into play.  These sponsors, however, are also pretty aware of the relatively few numbers they will reach through USA Team Handball.  USA Team Handball has generally been pretty successful in finding a uniform sponsor, although it’s not clear how much funding these deals brought in.  If the U.S. could find more success on the court and qualify for the World Championships and convince a U.S. network to air a few national team matches the uniform contract would certainly increase in value.

Companies with Generic Products:  There’s nothing to prevent Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, or some other random company from joining the USA Team Handball sponsorship family.  Well, nothing other than the same argument:  They’d be paying to reach only a few potential customers.  Still, despite this USA Team Handball has had some success in this area in the past.   If companies with Team Handball specific products have taken a pass on advertising with USA Team Handball, you might wonder why on Earth some other random company would give it a go?

The answer generally falls into a couple of categories.  First, some companies want to get aligned with the Olympic movement in any way possible and USA Team Handball can provide an entrée for doing so.  The most striking example was a substantial sponsorship (reportedly around $1M) from the Weather Channel during the 96 Olympics timeframe.  I don’t the full specifics of how this came to pass, but I suspect that the Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, wanted to join the Olympic family and was either coaxed or steered in USA Team Handball’s direction.   I’ll never forget the bizarre juxtaposition of seeing USA Team Handball promotional ads being aired in between weather forecasts and contemplating just how many people watching even knew what they were seeing.  Unfortunately, enticing these companies usually requires being in the Olympics which has proven problematic in recent years.

The second category generally requires someone in the company having an affinity to Team Handball.  How else to explain USA Team Handball’s current sponsorship from Grundfos, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of water pumps?  This Danish company clearly has an affinity to the sport because the likelihood of a USA Team Handball follower also having a need of a water pump is probably pretty small.  In many respects, the distinction between this sort of sponsor and a straight up donor is pretty negligible.

Donors:  If a sponsor provides money with the intent of promoting their product, a donor is someone or some company providing money with no real expectation of profit or promotion.  Donors support a charity, a movement, or a sports federation because they believe in the cause.   I don’t know how much money has been donated over the years, but I suspect that with the exception of Dieter Esch’s fairly recent generosity it hasn’t amounted to a whole lot.

Much like a presidential campaign there’s two ways to accumulate significant funding from donations.  You can either get a few people to contribute a lot or you can get a lot of people to contribute a little.

The millionaire donor:  During the Olympics, sports columnist Jack McCallum whimsically suggested that some altruistic millionaire should take it upon himself to fund USA Team Handball.

Not the first time somebody has come up with that idea as it is the simple solution to the big funding problem.  It seems somewhat silly, but it is at least conceivable.  After all, a lot of millionaires have purchased sports franchises and then bought players to win regardless of how much it costs their bottom line. The team becomes essentially a toy for them in the big scheme of things.  And even outside of professional sports, Paul Allen of Microsoft fame and T Boone Pickens have respectively, turned the Oregon and Oklahoma State NCAA Football teams into top programs.

From that perspective why not spend money turning around an Olympic sport?  The funny thing is, is this is sort of what happened to USA Team Handball on a smaller scale when Dieter Esch bankrolled the Federation from 2008-2010.  I say, “sort of” because Mr. Esch’s generosity had its limits, somewhere perhaps between $500K and $1M.  While his generosity was substantial, we would need Mark Cuban dollars for a full and complete turnaround.  And while I wouldn’t count on this happening, if there ever is someone with idle cash and a love for the sport, I sure hope USA Team Handball is ready to pounce with a pitch that will close the deal.

In the mean time, USA Team Handball could still make inroads with more donors being willing to contribute substantial, but still sizable donations.  Indeed this was the strategy behind the $50K cost for a Board of Director’s seat that Mr. Esch implemented.  And this was how Grundfos was brought into the fold.  Problem is, though, that more companies and businesses did not follow suit.  This could have been a salesmanship problem, but perhaps it’s more of a product problem.

Salesmanship Problem or a Product Problem?

One of the things that I’ve found amusing in online forums or in postgame discussions at the bar are critical comments directed at USA Team Handball for not raising more funds and/or being content to live off the USOC.  As if incompetence and laziness were the only things keeping us from going out in to the backyard to pick corporate checks off the fundraising tree.

I don’t have full insight into how much effort USA Team Handball put into fundraising over the years, but it clearly appears to have been a priority of the last GM and Board President.  Unfortunately, while they made good progress in establishing relationships with several European entities significant funding streams didn’t materialize.  Maybe they were simply bad salesmen, but I would assess their lack of success more to the bitter truth that there is little present value with the product of USA Team Handball.

It’s true that there are some incredible salesmen that can seemingly sale anything to anyone.   But in the midst of a struggling world economy even the Billy Mays of the world are going to come up short if the product doesn’t cut it.

So, given this currently reality how can we convince potential donors and sponsors to step forward and provide more funding to USA Team Handball?  Two answers:

1) Sell the future.  While the present value of USA Team Handball is paltry, the potential future value is exceedingly bright.  A nation of 308 Million people and only around 500 dedicated followers?  A sport tailor made for Americans?  For a long time sponsors and donors couldn’t see that potential future or thought it was a pipedream, but a number of developments have occurred in recent years to start turning some heads.  (To be discussed in the next installment)

In order to sell that future, however, USA Team Handball is going to have to convince the sponsors, donor and international partners that a clear plan is in place to make that future happen.

2) Improve the current product.  Of course, this is obvious, but it’s important to note that is not necessarily fully aligned with National Team performance.  No, the goal here is to improve the product from the viewpoint of potential sponsors and donors.  This means a number of things, but more than anything it means turning 500 dedicated followers into 5,000 and then 50,000 and then more.

So that wraps up the discussion on sponsor and donors.  In part 5, I further elaborate on some of the reasons the sport of handball is so little known in the U.S.  

Since the 96 Olympics the bottom line for USA Team Handball has been trending down.

In Part 1, I provided some top level analysis as to why our current national teams didn’t qualify for the London Olympics- we’re simply not very good.  In Part 2, I addressed the challenges USA Team Handball has had in finding and developing athletes.  In Part 3, I tackle the current lack of funding, some potential sources of additional revenue and why the U.S. has struggled to raise more funds.

It doesn’t take long for anyone observing the state of Team Handball in the U.S. to come up with a number of potential solutions as to how things could be turned around.  Very few of those solutions, however, come free and even the lowest cost options require some level of funding to implement.  It can be amusing to hear or read these would be solutions and then do some back of the envelope cost analysis to quickly determine that  the first year of implementation alone would bust the entire U.S. budget for the last decade.

Just how lacking is this “Lack of Funding?”

So, just how cash strapped is USA Team Handball?  I don’t have all the financial details, but the U.S. Government’s tax reporting requirements do provide a pretty good window of the trend that have occurred in the past two decades.  Using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990s that are available through different online resources, I was able to do some forensic analysis.   For each year, the first number is the amount listed on USA Team Handball’s Form 990s in regards to “gifts, grants and contributions received.”  The second number is the contribution amount listed in U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) Form 990s as being granted to USATH.

Year       Total Contributions         USOC Grant
1993       $841,615
1994       $1,396,152
1995       $1,204,365
1996       $1,383,813
1997       $867,116
1998       $585,000
1999       $563,152
2000       $741,322
2001       $652,364              $510,000
2002       $614,930              $379,000
2003       $547,091              $487,561
2004       $458,621              $354,237
2005       <<N/A>>             $281,620
2006       <<N/A>>             $3,184
2007       <<N/A>>             $500
2008       $489,150              $0
2009       $974,612              $238,268
2010       <<N/A>>             $335,552
2011       <<N/A>>              $283,202

First, a few notes regarding the data above:

– I couldn’t find USOC Form 990s prior to the year 2000.
– From 2006-2008 there was essentially no USA Team Handball Federation due to the USOC’s decertification of the Federation.  During that time period, however, the USOC took over many of the responsibilities of the Federation.  It would be interesting to see what it cost the USOC to run Team Handball during that period, but those numbers aren’t available.
– The USOC fiscal year is the same as the Calendar year while USA Team Handball’s Fiscal Year is from 1 July to 30 June.  In other words 2009 data is actually from 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2010.
– Reportedly, there was a number of accounting problems with USA Team Handball’s 2010 Form 990 and I think that is why it hasn’t been filed yet.
– There are several other items that I could have listed in the table to include total revenue and total expenses.  With few exceptions, however, total revenue and expenses track very closely to the total contribution number.  In other words, almost all of USA Team Handball’s revenue has been in the form of grants and USA Team Handball expenses have matched that revenue.  (Although, based on reports of debt problems this is probably not true for the 2010-2011 timeframe.)
– The Form 990 does not require the filing organization to fully break out where the contributions come from and for what amount.  This is why I include the USOC reporting of grants to Team Handball.  Additionally, it appears that older versions of the form don’t clearly delineate between grant and sponsorship funding.

While there are a lot of limitations with this data, it does provide a pretty good indication of the downward trend in funding.  Certainly from the high water mark (around the 96 Olympics) to the demise of the Federation in 2006 there’s a significant drop in funding.  And not surprisingly, there was a corresponding drop in performance on the court with the U.S. not coming anywhere close to qualifying for the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.  Aside from the drop in national team performance the lack of funding undoubtedly exacerbated USA Team Handball’s management/leadership problems leading to the Federation’s eventual decertification by the USOC.

With the establishment of the new Federation in 2008 there was an uptick in funding, but this uptick was mostly attributable to the generosity of Dieter Esch.  USOC funding from 2009 to 2011 has ranged from $238K to $335K, still far below reported figures from 2000-2004 and surely below grants provided during the 1996 Olympics timeframe.  With Dieter Esch deciding to turn off the spigot in 2010, USA Team Handball is reportedly back to a budget in the $300-500K range.

It can be debated as to just how much USA Team Handball needs in terms of funding to field competitive teams, but few would argue that $300-500K is sufficient.  Certainly, if $1.3M budgets were required in the 1996 timeframe to be “respectable” in Atlanta, then probably at least that much (adjusted for inflation) is needed today.  And not to mention, there’s a whole lot more than just national team budgets to consider.  How do you also pay for development and the interests of the membership at large.  And marketing, staff salaries, etc, etc.  Really, to do things right you probably need more like $5M.

So, Where’s the “Mo Money” Going to Come from?

So, if it’s so obvious you need more money, why you just craft a plan and go get it.  Right?  If only, it was so easy.  On the plus side, it is fairly obvious what the potential sources of additional revenue are, it’s just that convincing those sources to actually cough up the bucks is easier said than done.  What follows is a list of the potential sources, why they haven’t contributed as much as maybe they should and some top level assessment as to what it’s going to take for them to change their minds.

USOC:  For decades the USOC has been the main funding source for USA Team Handball.  This funding has varied over the years at times probably pushing the $1M mark at the high end and bottoming out to zero at the low end.  (It would be interesting to see more definitive financial data going back to the 1970s and adjusted for inflation, but that information is not readily available.)   In more recent years it has been around $300K.  So what happened?   Why the dramatic decrease in funding support?

The simple answer is that since the 96 Olympics the USOC has increasingly decided to base their funding decisions on what a sport’s chances for getting a medal are.  With the U.S. not being coming close to a medal in 96 and clearly no chance of medalling on the horizon it’s easy to see how Team Handball is going to come up short when competing against the likes of Swimming and Gymnastices.  Even worse as a team sport the costs of fielding a competitive team are pretty substantial and the return on investment can only be one medal in each gender.  The bitter reality is that no matter how you slice and dice it, if you’re trying to maximize medals for the least cost, investing in Team Handball is a fool’s errand.

Might the USOC, however, rethink its current medal emphasis?  I can think of a number of other factors that should be considered when the USOC makes these decisions.  Those factors include Federation need, potential TV audience and health/fitness for the nation as a whole.  In each of those areas USA Team Handball scores pretty high.  “Need” certainly doesn’t need to be explained.  As witnessed by the buzz from the recent Olympics it should be even clearer to USOC reps that the sport is tailor made for TV.  I’m obviously biased, but I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that the dynamics of attractive Team Handball match is inherently more entertaining than watching an arrow hit a target or boat crews rowing their oars back and forth.  Finally, with obesity becoming an increasing health concern the prospect of thousands of youths running up and down the court is a selling point that the USOC will/should at least listen to.

While these are factors that the USOC appears to consider, the goal is still clearly gold, silver or bronze.  And as long as that’s the case the best USA Team Handball can probably hope for is probably around $500K/year, an amount which is more in line with the funding levels of some of the other minor Olympic sports.

But the USOC isn’t the only game in town, in Part 4 I’ll review why funding has also been lacking from international entities, sponsors and other sources of potential revenue.