When and where is the 2023 World Cup?
The 28th Men’s World Handball Championship is scheduled to take place in Poland and Sweden from 11 to 29 January 2023. There will be four venues in Poland: Kraków, Gdansk, Katowice and Plock. Five venues have been selected for Sweden: Stockholm, Malmö, Gothenburg, Jönköping and Kristianstad.
Participant
The World Cup will be held with 32 teams. The two hosts and defending champion Denmark are automatically qualified. In addition, there are the five best teams from the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations and the five best from the 2022 Asian Cup. Plus Spain, France and Norway as the three best teams from the 2022 European Championship. Plus nine other teams from Europe: Belgium, Hungary, Croatia, Iceland, Serbia, Germany, Portugal, Montenegro and North Macedonia. Seven other tickets will go to South and North America and two lucky wild card winners.
German opportunities
Even the national coach does not dare to predict what the German team is really capable of. What is inside? The title? Rather not. An even weaker performance than the historically poor twelfth place at the 2021 World Cup? The newly formed team actually has too much talent for that.
What figure does the national coach make?
Alfred Gislason – the 62-year-old has been the national coach for a little over two years and has been working under difficult conditions ever since. The fact that his team sometimes struggles even in the World Cup playoffs against a blatant outsider like the Faroe Islands fits into the picture, so to speak. In the 33:27 win in the second leg on Saturday in Torshavn, the DHB selection was even behind at halftime. Gislason was annoyed but remained calm on the outside. He has known these changing ideas for a long time. For several months, the Icelander has moderated a huge upheaval.
What is the roster like?
Established players like Patrick Wiencek, Steffen Weinhold or Hendrik Pekeler resigned from the DHB team, instead Gislason built in a second division top talent like Julian Köster from VfL Gummersbach. In his previous courses, the coach never had the same squad together due to corona cases, injuries or other reasons. It is therefore not surprising that he and his players are currently finding it difficult to predict the World Cup.
When are the next appointments?
The team will not meet again until autumn for their next course. What Gislason has left until then: analyze old games, watch current Bundesliga games, talk to his World Cup candidates, think about it. For example about one of his biggest construction sites. Without Wiencek and Pekeler there is a huge problem in the middle of the defense, captain Johannes Golla and his neighbor Simon Ernst don’t harmonize with each other.