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Travel chaos, no planning security and many empty seats. Away from sport, the Handball World Cup has plenty of room for improvement.
The principle of “Blind Booking” enjoys a certain popularity with some travel enthusiasts. You book a trip without knowing the destination beforehand. The perks are thrills and a chance at a real bargain.
logistical disaster
You felt a little bit like that at this Handball World Championship, which, as a reminder, takes place in Poland and Sweden – only there weren’t any bargains. Of eight quarter-finalists, only one knew before his game on Wednesday night where he would have to play 48 hours later. Namely co-host Sweden, for whom it was clear that he would stay in Stockholm regardless of his own result.
A logistical disaster. Hotels, flights and a rat’s tail of other organizational masterpieces had to be carried out in cloak-and-dagger operations in order to cart all teams from Gdansk to Stockholm, for example, on the one game-free day after the quarter-finals.
Norway: 2,000 kilometers, nine games, four venues
This also affected the German team in particular, but the Norwegians were hit the hardest. They played their preliminary round in Kraków, then traveled about 80 kilometers to Katowice for the main round, then over 500 kilometers to Gdansk for their quarter-finals over 500 kilometers and only after their bitter defeat in extra time against Spain did they have the certainty that they would already be there the next day would have to fly to Stockholm. A good 1400 more kilometers.
So by the end of the tournament, the Norwegians will have played nine games in 17 days at four different locations, traveling around 2,000 kilometers, of which they had to organize the last 1,400 within a few hours.
Arrival for fans can hardly be planned – accordingly empty halls
Incidentally, this uncertainty and forced spontaneity is also at least a questionable pleasure for media professionals from the respective countries. This sentence was written with a pinch of frustration and very dark under-eye circles.
The situation is much more thankless for fans from the respective nations. Traveling after your own team after the preliminary and main rounds, getting tickets, organizing a hotel and paying for everything is made extremely difficult for the common handball fan.
France’s Kentin Mahé said on ZDF after the quarter-final victory over Germany in view of the upcoming semi-final against Sweden in Stockholm: “Apart from the Poland game, we actually played in front of empty stands, so we’re really looking forward to this game.”
In fact, in many high-profile or important games, many seats remained vacant. The hosts played, the halls cooked – but often they only steamed. An estimated 2,000 of the 22,000 seats were occupied for Germany’s placement game against Egypt, played in Stockholm’s repurposed football stadium. It was almost advisable to mute the cell phone so as not to disturb the other people present.
More games, more stress – bloated tournament
“Organizationally something is going wrong”, Mahé had already described the overall situation after his team’s main round match against Spain. The fact that decisive main round games sometimes did not take place at the same time and that teams could theoretically choose their opponents was not even included. Quarter-finals then took place at the same time, so that the handball fan in front of the screen had to make a decision.
For the second time a World Cup finals were held with 32 instead of 24 teams, for the second time a men’s World Cup finals were held in two countries. The purely physical strain on the players was also much higher as a result – not just because of the one more game. Despite all the enthusiasm for many sporting highlights, the realization remains that more is not always automatically more.