BLOG: “Gidsel’s Story: Why Handball Needs a Stronger PR Strategy”

Posted on 13. February 2025.

Zika Bogdanovic
Handball-Planet.com editor

The leaders of Füchse Berlin, Stefan Kretschmar and Bob Hanning, during the IHF World Championship 2025, made a series of critiques and logical suggestions that could make handball a more globally attractive and watchable sport. The vicious circle that world handball is caught in—both with the best national teams and the countries that host major tournaments (from Scandinavia to Germany and France)—threatens to reduce interest, while the “European” label might never fade. While the latest successes of Portugal and Brazil are encouraging, it’s clear to everyone that handball is stuck somewhere between Herning and Cologne and is in need of new energy.

That energy is missing from the International Handball Federation. The World Championship was completed, but no new standards were set. From a media standpoint, it was at the level of an ordinary tournament that came and went. The IHF has long lacked any media strategy and is practically without a PR team, while the EHF is at a much higher level, but with less influence on development projects. The EHF organizes a “Hall of Fame” evening in December with fresh retirees like Nikola Karabatić and Mikkel Hansen, and they don’t show up in Vienna? Imagine if that happened to someone like Dirk Nowitzki?

World Championships, except in Germany, are mostly a spectacle for the local audience, with few fans from other countries or just the players’ families and a small handball community following the event. To comment on any IHF media or marketing strategy, one would first have to exist.

The problem is multifaceted, tied to the development of handball rules, the absence of serious projects for the development of handball outside Europe, the formation of professional leagues, and the branding of players—both male and female—who should be setting new boundaries for exposure.

Clubs are not helping in this regard. The latest example is the extension of Mathias Gidsel’s contract at Füchse Berlin. Arguably the best handball player in the world this decade, Gidsel extended his contract with the team from Berlin until 2029. Big thing just few days after he showed epic class and took MVP title in Oslo. We learned of this because someone, probably via phone, took a picture of the player, his agent, and Bob Hanning in some dimly lit hotel room. There was no official statement in English directed to international media, no message from Gidsel in English, and no properly crafted promotional video—just a hastily put-together spot showing him throwing darts at a dartboard. With only around 250,000 views on Instagram, maybe that spot defeated the competition (believe or not, the most views in handball world this season had arrival of Petar Djordjic at RK Partizan Beograd), but those numbers are still insignificant when compared to other sports (don’t look Luka Doncic trade to Lakers). It’s an amateur approach, and we’re talking about the greatest handball player of today!? And Fuchse Berlin is not an isolated case.

Who will set the standards if not the biggest clubs with the greatest players? About ten years ago, I mentioned to some German colleagues who wrote a book on the history of THW Kiel that the book should be translated into English. They looked at me as if I had said the Earth was flat. That German handball insularity and closed system, disconnected from the needs of the global handball world, is a serious problem right after the IHF amateurism. The ignorance that you, as a nation, have the best handball product that captivates attention for 10 months a year, that you are essentially the NBA where the greatest talents and players come together, while also drawing the attention of people from Tel Aviv, Belgrade, Plzen, Athens, Alicante, and Lisbon, is a major problem for handball as a whole.

Daikin Bundesliga and Bundesliga teams, please adapt the content to the entire world and understand that the whole planet is watching you.