Handball

Handball uses two referees where almost every court sport on this site uses one, and the reason is that the sport permits contact its officials cannot see from a single position.

A defender may obstruct a moving attacker with a bent arm. Collisions happen continuously, at speed, in a confined space, with bodies between the official and the incident. Two referees positioned diagonally is the minimum that works.

The two instruments worth recording are both conversions of judgement into counting.

The four-pass rule after a passive-play warning replaced a vague sanction with an arithmetic one. Before it, a referee warned a team for stalling and then had to decide, unaided, when to punish them; now the team has four passes. That is the same move basketball made with the shot clock in 1954 and wrestling made with its passivity clock in 2018, and handball is the third sport on this site to arrive at it.

The blue card, from 2016, separates the on-court sanction from the disciplinary consequence. A referee showing red no longer has to decide whether the offence was tactical or dangerous — the blue card triggers a written report and a process afterwards. That is an official being given permission not to adjudicate everything on the spot, which is rare.

Video review exists at major tournaments for goal-line and end-of-time questions, which are facts. What remains judged is contact, and it always will be: whether a defender's arm was obstruction or a push is a question about degree, and handball's whole style of play sits on that boundary.

Handball is the most regionally concentrated major team sport on this site. Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Poland and Montenegro dominate, with Egypt, Qatar, Brazil and South Korea the significant non-European presences.

Essentially the entire professional economy is European, and much of it is in Germany and France, whose domestic leagues employ most of the world's elite players.

The reason is historical rather than physical. Handball was invented in northern Europe, embedded in European school systems, and never travelled through empire or emigration the way football, cricket and rugby did. It has grown where it was taught and almost nowhere else.

The facility requirement compounds it. A handball court is larger than a basketball or volleyball court and needs an indoor hall, which is a building — so the sport competes for exactly the facilities that basketball and volleyball already occupy in most of the world, and usually loses.

Beach handball is the federation's development answer, in the same way hockey5s and rugby sevens are for their sports: cheaper to stage, played outdoors, and with a scoring system that rewards spectacular goals with double points. It has not yet changed the map.

The women's game has a similar geography with Norway, France, Denmark and the Netherlands strongest, and unusually for this site its professional structures are comparably developed to the men's.

Handball is a Scandinavian and German invention of the 1910s and 1920s, and it was two sports before it was one.

The German version, Feldhandball, was played outdoors on a football pitch by eleven players a side. The Danish and Swedish version was indoors and seven-a-side, because northern European winters make an outdoor ball sport impractical for half the year.

The outdoor game was the Olympic sport in 1936, in Berlin, and was contested at world championships into the 1960s. The indoor game won, became the international standard in 1966, and the outdoor version simply stopped.

That is one of the cleanest format replacements on this site. Handball did not add a shorter version and keep both, as cricket and rugby did. It changed which sport it was, and its Olympic history has a thirty-six-year gap in the middle where the transition happened.

The rule that gives handball its shape was there from the start: nobody except the goalkeeper may stand in the six-metre area in front of the goal. Attackers may jump into it and must release the ball before landing, which is why the sport's characteristic image is a player suspended in mid-air above the arc.

The IHF in its present form dates from 1946, and the indoor game returned to the Olympic programme in 1972.

Handball has almost no equipment history, and its one recurring equipment argument is about a substance that is not part of the sport at all.

The ball is small enough to hold in one hand — that is its whole design requirement, because the sport's actions are throwing, catching and shooting one-handed. Sizes differ between the men's and women's game and have been stable for decades.

Resin is the argument. Players use adhesive resin on their hands to control the ball, which improves grip, ball-handling and shooting accuracy substantially. It is not regulated as performance equipment and is used universally at elite level.

It also coats the ball, the floor and everything else, damages court surfaces, and is banned in a significant number of sports halls — including some that handball would otherwise use. So the sport has an unofficial performance substance that determines which venues it can play in, and no rule about it either way.

That is a genuinely unusual position on this site. Table tennis banned speed glue on health grounds in 2008. Athletics wrote a shoe specification. Handball has an ubiquitous grip aid that shapes its facility access and has never legislated on it.

Protective equipment is minimal — knee support and occasional headbands — in a sport with heavy permitted contact, which is one reason its shoulder and knee injury rates are high.

The IHF's most consequential recent act was an accident, and that is worth saying plainly.

In 2016 the federation removed the requirement that a substitute for the goalkeeper wear a distinguishing shirt and act as a goalkeeper. The stated purpose was to simplify a clumsy substitution procedure. The effect, within two seasons, was that elite teams began attacking seven against six with an empty net as a standard tactic.

The federation has spent the decade since deciding whether it approves. The empty-net attack is exciting, produces long-range goals into an unguarded net, and increases variance considerably — and it also means a large part of elite handball is now played without one of its seven positions on court.

Nothing else on this site is quite like it. Most rule changes here were made to produce an effect, and the arguments are about whether the effect was worth it. This one produced an effect nobody was aiming at.

The federation's other 2016 changes were more deliberate and more typical of this site's patterns. The four-pass limit after a passive-play warning converted a referee's judgement into a count, which is the same instrument basketball's shot clock and wrestling's passivity clock are. The blue card separated a sending-off from the disciplinary process that follows it.

Handball's structural politics is European. The sport's professional strength is concentrated in Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Balkans, its club competitions are European, and the IHF's global development ambitions run against a domestic economy that is regional.

The empty net, 2016. Handball's most significant modern change and the one nobody intended.

The old rule required a goalkeeper substitute to wear a distinguishing shirt and function as a goalkeeper, which made the substitution slow and rare. The new rule removed that, on the stated ground that the procedure was clumsy.

Elite teams read it correctly and immediately: if there is no requirement to have a goalkeeper, attack with seven outfield players against six defenders and leave the net empty. The numerical advantage in attack is worth more than the risk of conceding a shot from distance — usually.

Within two seasons it was standard. It is the highest-variance legal tactic in any team sport on this site, and it emerged from a rule change presented as administrative.

The stall. Handball's passive play rule asked a referee to judge whether a team was genuinely trying to score, which is the same judgement wrestling and judo make about engagement and find equally difficult. After a warning, a team now has four passes to shoot. A judgement became a count.

The walk back. Before 1994 a goal was followed by both teams returning to their halves before the restart, which in a sport scoring thirty times a side meant a great deal of walking. Allowing an immediate throw-off created the fast centre, a scoring chance produced entirely by a restart rule.

Resin. Not a controversy that forced a rule, and included because it is one that has not. A performance-enhancing grip substance is used universally, damages venues, is banned in many halls, and remains unregulated.

Recorded as unsettled.

The empty net. A decade after the rule that permitted it, the sport has not settled whether it likes what it made. Supporters say the seven-against-six attack is exciting and rewards risk. Opponents say a sport with a goalkeeper position should not be routinely played without one, and that the tactic survives because the punishment — a long shot into an open net — is less reliable than it should be.

Proposals to restrict it, by requiring a delay or by making the empty-net goal worth more, circulate and have not been adopted.

Resin. Universal, performance-relevant, unregulated, and the reason a significant number of halls will not host handball. The sport has never legislated on a substance that shapes both how it is played and where.

Contact. Handball permits more contact than any other indoor court sport here, and its shoulder and knee injury rates reflect that. Whether the balance between defensive obstruction and dangerous play sits in the right place is argued after every major tournament.

The map. The IHF's development ambitions are global and its professional economy is European. Beach handball is the intended answer and has not yet delivered one, and the sport competes for indoor facilities with basketball and volleyball almost everywhere outside Europe.