EHF and IHF Presidents meet in Vienna

EHF President Michael Wiederer and IHF President Dr Hassan Moustafa discussed a range of topics of common interest for both federations on Wednesday, 22 May, in the EHF headquarters in Vienna.

The meeting was part of the regular leadership meetings between the continental federation and the international federation.

The new competition system in both European and World Championships was part of the discussion as the EHF has recently announced that the Women’s EHF EURO will expand to 24 teams from 2024 on and the IHF decided to enlarge the Men’s World Championship to 32 participating teams from 2021.

“Handball needs to grow and we need to give a chance to the teams who are between the low and the top level. There are a lot of those teams and we want to help them,” said Dr Hassan Moustafa on the expansion of the World Championship.

The EHF President updated Dr Hassan Moustafa about the beach handball activities in Europe and the possibility of beach handball joining the Olympic movement was discussed.

“We want to add beach handball to the Olympic programme and we already participated at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires 2018 where beach handball was one of the most popular sports. That is the reason why beach handball is one of the most important topics for us and why we want to add this sport to the Olympic family.

“We started two years ago when we organised a showcase event in Lausanne where we invited the IOC President Thomas Bach. That is when we decided and agreed that beach handball will be a part of the Youth Olympic Games. Beach handball will also be showcased at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and we are on a good way to fully add it to the Olympics in the future,” explained the IHF President.

A very important topic for both federations is wheelchair handball. The EHF has started with wheelchair handball activities in 2015 and has successfully organised European Championships.

Dr Hassan Moustafa looks beyond that and expresses a wish to add wheelchair handball to the Paralympics: “I had a meeting with the president of the Paralympic Committee who told me that we need to organise a minimum of two World Championships in order to become a part of the Paralympic programme.

“The EHF President and I have discussed this and I hope we can organise those events and be confirmed as Paralympic sport.”

The two presidents also talked about the schedule of the upcoming continental and international conferences. The EHF Conference of Presidents will take place on the fringes of the VELUX EHF FINAL4 in Cologne on 1 June. The IHF will have its ordinary IHF Congress in Gothenburg from 2 to 5 July.