During the next couple of months, I will present some tidbits of observations from the ‘Play the Game’ conference which I recently attended.  As I hope some of you have become aware in recent years, when I have made references to the work of this organization, it is the one group in the world of sport, whose efforts in the areas of governance and anti-corruption I really respect and support.  Apart from its continuous efforts, ‘Play the Game’ organizes a global conference every two years.   This time it was held at their home base in Aarhus, Denmark.  Around 400 journalists, sports officials and academics from around the world attended.

The coverage includes a broad spectrum of topics, beyond the general issues of governance, ethics, and corruption in national and international sports organizations. The many problems discovered within the realm of the IOC and especially in FIFA have had a lot of exposure.  Doping-related topics have figured prominently on the agenda for many years now, and the Lance Armstrong affair has only served to increase the concerns regarding doping.  Match fixing has emerged as another core issue, in light of the ever-increasing number of discoveries of such problems in different sports around the globe.

But many issues also relate to the tension or competition between, on the one hand, resources and facilities for sports activities for the masses and, on the other hand, the enormous resources spent on events and stadiums for events such as the OIympic Games and the World Cup in soccer.  Are we catering too much to passive spectators in elite events, at the expense of physical education, health, and fitness for both the young and the adults?   And does it remain sensible to incur such huge expenses for one-time events in countries where the overall population sees many of its basic needs go unmet.

This debate has been particularly acute in recent time, considering the massive construction in Sochi for the Winter Olympics, and the national reactions in Brazil regarding the Summer Olympics in 2016 and the World Cup in 2014.  When soccer-crazy Brazil sees violent demonstrations against these events, then that should perhaps be an eye-opener.   The Winter Games in Russia have caused another debate to surface, namely about the impression that only authoritarian regimes with vast resources can genuinely compete for the hosting of such big events.   Similar questions have come up in connection with Qatar’s successful bid for the soccer World Cup in 2022.

But for the moment I will leave you with this overview of some of the topics that I will expand on in subsequent articles.  I will just add a comment that I received from a Russian journalist who attended the ‘Play the Game’ conference.  It is of course a general trend these days that media reporting from sports events focuses on results, statistics, injuries, transfers and cute background stories about star athletes.  But my Russian friend seemed a bit confused or disturbed at one point:  “why are there so many stories and reports about problems and negative issues”, was his question.  Perhaps he had not quite realized beforehand that this is one of the main purposes of the ‘Play the Game’ organization and its conferences.   There is another side of the coin; sports, unfortunately, does not have just a sunny and glossy side.  There are too many people and issues which serve to undermine the benefits and enjoyment of sports.  We need to shine a light on that!

rather than showing a photo of the IHF president, it seems more logical to have a picture of his two role models, ex-president Mubarak with FIFA’s Blatter

John has already drawn sufficient attention to the presentation I gave under the above rubric at the ‘Play the Game’ conference a couple of weeks ago.  And I offered a preview of the IHF Congress in three articles just before it started.  So in a way there is not much to add now regarding the IHF Congress, as my heading really captures the essence.

There were absolutely no surprises at the IHF Congress.  As I had noted, the President had used different methods to secure the necessary votes well ahead of time.  And this reality was clear to all the Congress participants, including those many who would have liked to see a regime change.  But the IHF president is not a person against whom you launch a battle unless you know that you have a majority of the votes, as he is likely to seek damaging revenge against anyone going up against him.  So there were simply no candidates in opposition to the president and his three colleagues on the Executive Committee.

This limited the ‘excitement’ to the election for the added fifth position on the Executive.  But here the reports from the Congress make it clear that the president had simply let it be known who his preferred candidate was or, better put, the only one for whom he would direct the huge block of votes which he controlled.  The person elected, Frantisek Taborsky of the Czech Republic, a soft-spoken and gentle academic of ‘the old school’, was then not a surprising choice.  Frantisek is a nice person who will not ‘ruffle any feathers’, so the president clearly expects him to be loyal and unlikely to create problems.

All the reports suggest that the Congress swallowed the president’s propaganda speeches, and that nobody seriously questioned why the IHF sets aside such an absurdly small amount of its budget for the development of handball in the small or new handball nations around the world.  Apropos new members, apparently, the president was in a rage when he found that he did not reach the target of 200 member nations, as the final number came out at 199….   Presumably, there will now be a ‘witch hunt’ to determine whose fault this is.

This just confirms that the focus is on the prestige of the numbers, and indirectly also the number of votes that the president can obtain.  It matters less that many of these 199 countries do not really play handball and do not get the support they need and deserve from the IHF.   Similarly, it did not seem to disturb the Congress participants that the amounts of revenue from marketing and sponsors are really pitiful for a sport with the traditions and popularity of handball.  And there are indications that the main sponsor, Adidas, intends to cut back on it support.

It was interesting to be among a large group of sports officials and journalists from especially Denmark and Germany, when the outcome of the IHF Congress was becoming known.  These are, of course, the nations which compete for the honor of having ‘invented’ handball, and our sport has more exposure in these countries than virtually anywhere else.   Moreover, at the end of the Congress, the IHF Council decided to award the hosting of the men’s 2019 World Championship to precisely these two countries.  While there was some enthusiasm about this decision for 2019, it was also quite obvious that most journalists who follow handball know about the basic problems of the IHF.

But they admit that handball and the IHF never get the same exposure as the IOC and FIFA when governance issues and corruption are given some media attention, beyond the normal reporting of match results, player transfers etc.   And to some extent, the defeatist approach of the European Handball Federation and the respective national federations plays a role in that.  When the EHF prefers to focus on its own competitions and affairs instead of taking on the problems at the IHF level, and when the Danish and German federations just ‘turn the other cheek’ and beg the IHF to award a World Championship to them, it becomes more difficult for media to take a lot of interest in all the things that need to change in the global world of handball.  As some journalists commented, “regrettably, we have become far too used to ethics problems and corruption in international sports, so we do not react as strongly as we should.”