The 27th World Handball Championship starts on January 13, and this year it will be held in Egypt. Although everything in the world is affected by the pandemic, the matches will not be played without spectators - although it was originally planned that the capacity would be 30%, it was finally decided that the audience would be filled to a capacity of 20%.

Without underestimating anyone, at first glance I would single out some old favorites who should play the lead roles in this competition as well. From group A there are Germany and Hungary, and from groups B and C we should definitely single out Spain and Croatia who played a friendly match a few days ago in which Croatia won as host (31-28). Three days later, Spain also played a friendly match with Russia and also lost (26-28), so even though it is a preparatory match, it is possible that Spain has some problems given the number of goals conceded in those two matches.

The absolute favorite of Group D is of course Denmark, which lost a friendly match against Norway (34-36) yesterday, which brings us to a very interesting Group E with France and Norway. I have to admit that group F is quite unknown to me, while from groups G and H I would single out Sweden and Slovenia as possible favorites.

I hope for good handball and as few refereeing mistakes as possible - and let the best one win

More info on link : https://www.handballegypt2021.com/

Nice thread Though I don't follow Handball in general very much, the WC/EC/Olympics are always nice to check out and by watching the games you get a good impression pretty fast and can find some good bets without being an expert.

Some bad news were already published in December, when some core pieces of the german NT cancelled their participation due to safety concerns. There were some discussions about it, since these players did play in Bundesliga/CL all the time and now all of sudden, they consider the WC with a quite good hygiene concept unsafe, but anyway.

The missing players will be Hendrik Pekeler, Patrick Wiencek, Steffen Weinhold (all THW Kiel) and Finn Lemke (MT Melsungen). This is a big blow for Germany, since the guys from Kiel have been the defensive heart and soul and it will be very hard to replace this well working block in the middle of the defense. So don't expect a lot from Germany, betting on overs could maybe be a good option.

Here are the outright odds taken from William Hill:


Source: https://sports.williamhill.com/betting/en-gb/handball

I do not see any official information that the Czech Republic or Sweden will not participate in this competition, data from the IHF from yesterday confirm their performance. In situations like this, it’s always good to have a backup option, as players can become positive on a daily basis.


I do not see how a smaller number of people who would respect all epidemiological measures would be a problem, but still the decision was made to play without spectators.

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I find it ridiculous that someone refuses to play a competition like this because they are afraid of infection, but at the same time they play the domestic league and also the final four of the handball Champions League without any problems. Still, maybe this is an opportunity for some new players to show what they can do.

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Then you are not at all familiar with handball, because this sport is very popular in these countries, as is the case with hockey, but of course football. Their leagues are certainly not as strong as the German or Spanish ones, but that is because their best players play in those leagues. At the last European Women's Handball Championship, Norway won first place which only shows that handball is a very important sport for them.

Egypt is a solid team but nothing more. Their big plus in this championship is home turf. There is usually the talk of referees favoring home teams in handball and Egypt is very physical team which can use that to the maximum. Since there will not be supporters in the stand maybe that influence will not be that big but I will still be vary careful before betting against them.

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Croatia actually has very little injury problems this year and we should make good use of that. We are missing only Stepancic which seems very insignificant when we check absentees from teams like Germany or Sweden. Maybe we will even manage to do good against France now that they are without older Karabatic

It is a pity of course that the Russian athletes have to play under the flag of FGR (Russian Handball Federation) instead of the state tricolor, but I think it should not affect the game itself and they will show their best side as always.

I think at least Russian handball players will come out of their group winners.

Same here mate. I don't really know what Handball is until now then I've searched it on Youtube and watched some highlights and it was pretty fun to watch. I see it waaaay better and enjoyable than football (if you would play it as well). Also, it reminds me of some childhood room basketball with relatives where you pitch the ball on a box. I guess this would be part of sports I would be searching, watching, and betting on. I just hope that there would also prediction threads for the upcoming handball games in this championship. 

I just went to see the groups and saw that Cape Verde is playing in the tournament?

I really dislike what they are doing with handball, they are killing the sport. 32 teams, half of them will be losing by double figures. 3 new teams (Uruguay, Cape Verde and DR Congo) combined would probably lose to a club I played for 20 years ago.

Yeah it seems a bit crazy too include all these tiny countries. But we shouldn't forget that handball needs more followers too. It could be a good way to include more countries and people from all around the world. In the end it only means that the group stage becomes more predictable and less exciting games. But the quarter and semi finals should be very exciting games. It also means less of the good teams will be knocked out on the group stage.

Problem with handball is that big differences in quality can't be hidden by playing defense and counter attacking like in football. Any of the top teams can just decide to play serious defense for 20 minutes and make +15 goal difference in that time. Or treat the game as training and let the guys have fun. It is unfortunate that this expansion of teams coincided with covid outbreak. I can already see some top team getting kicked from competition because half of their team got covid in one of those less important matches.

This year, teams can bring 20 (instead of usual 16) players and if they can't field 10 healthy players for any game they are out of competition.

Yes, this competition should have been postponed! Look at the mess that is happening: Egypt has already a lot of troubles going on in the country and I think the least they can do now is to make sure that an handball competition will be covid risk-free.
Would you do that as a professional player? I personally would not go there and risk my life (and career) to have some fun.