Some of Handball’s Most Dramatic Upsets

Handball, also known as team handball in the US, is a fairly popular sport globally. Of course, it does not have the worldwide fan base of football, cricket, or basketball, but it is fair to say that it’s more established and developed than volleyball, for example. It enjoys high levels of organization in the Scandinavian nations, France, Germany, the Balkans, and some parts of Eastern Europe. It is growing in popularity in Africa, with northern regions of the Mother of Mankind having the most history with this sport, primarily Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. In South America, it is somewhat big in Brazil, and South Korea is an Asia handball hotspot, as its female team is a regular competitor in international tournaments and one that has reached various heights, winning two Olympic gold medals and one World Championship between 1988 and 1995.

Without question, France and Germany have the strongest national leagues, and matches from the European Champions League, run by the EHF (European Handball Federation), are the most-watched club events on the planet. As far as international tournaments go, continental and world championships get organized every two years, with handball traditionally getting featured in the Summer Olympics.

For those unfamiliar with this sport, it is vital to point out that this is a high-scoring game where technical skill, experience, fitness, tactics, and athleticism are all needed to succeed. Luck plays a minimum role in defining match outcomes. In this aspect, handball is similar to basketball. Smaller teams may have a good run in periods of the game, but they usually lack the depth and consistency to compete across the full sixty minutes, and quality winds up shining in the end. Despite the sport relying on structured play, more than good coaching is needed to compensate for skill gaps between teams. Still, like all forms of athletic contests, upsets in handball also happen, and here we tell you a few we are unaware of that took gamblers by surprise.

Argentina Beats Sweden by Five Goals – 2011 World Championship

In the past two decades, Argentina has had an okay handball national team, winning the Pan American Championship on seven occasions and finishing in tenth place at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Nonetheless, they had never had good showings in the World Championships, with a fifteen-place finish being their best one up to 2011 in 2001. On the flip side, Sweden, as noted above, has had a deep tradition with the sport, the same as the other Scandinavian nations. They have won the World Championship four times, with the last time being in 1999, and they have snagged five European Championship gold medals.

So, there was no mistake about who was the favorite when Argentina and Sweden met in a Group D match-up in the 2011 World Championship. Up to that game, the Swedes were 3-0 in the group, besting Slovakia, South Korea, and Chile, but they surprisingly lost to Argentina, quite handily so, on their home court no less, inside the Gothenburg’s Scandinavium arena.

RK Vardar Wins the 2019 EHF CL Final Four

RK Vardar from North Macedonia won the 2017 EHF Champions League season, and the club played in the 2018 Final Four of this competition. Hence, they had built up a reputation in the mid-2010s as one of the powerhouses of European handball, backed by a Russian owner who was not shy about spending money on top players after his 2013 takeover of the club. However, in 2018, the team entered a financial crisis, and its players had not gotten paid for nine months going into their unlikely entrance into the 2019 Final Four tournament, the ending stages of the 2018/19 Champions League season.

Before the start of this mini-tournament, some bookmakers gave them ten to one odds to win the whole thing, the lowest of the four teams in it. In their first match-up, they met Barcelona, whom they lost to at home and away in the group stage. OddsPortal notes that Barca was a five-to-one favorite before the first whistle, and was seven goals up at half-time. Yet, Vardar magically turned to a semi-final round and edged out Barcelona by two goals. In the final, they met Hungarian Veszprem, who were also heavily favored to win but lost by again two goals to Vardar.

Iceland’s 2008 Men’s Olympic Silver

Despite Iceland’s relatively small size, it is a reasonably successful sporting nation. With less than four hundred thousand citizens, this Nordic island country, at the peak of Europe, has done fairly well in various international competitions. That said, handball is considered the national sport for both men and women. Before 2008, the men’s team’s biggest success came in 2002, when they took fourth place in the European Championship in Sweden. After that, they did not sniff a semi-final in the following Euros and Worlds Championships, finishing eighth in the 2007 Germany Worlds and eleventh in the 2008 Norwegian Euros.

Hence, no one had high hopes that they could go all the way to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Yet, they almost did. After getting six points in the group stage, the same as South Korea and Denmark, Iceland took out Poland in the Quarterfinals and stunned Spain in the semis with a dominant 36-30 win. They eventually lost the gold medal to powerhouse France but fought admirably against the squad that took home gold in the 2006 Euros and 2009 Worlds and again claimed the gold medal in the following Olympics, the 2012 one in London.

Cape Verde’s 2022 Second-Place Finish in the African Championship

When it comes to Africa, Tunisia is the most decorated country for handball. In recent years, it has lost a lot of ground to Egypt, the second-most-decorated African nation in this sport, and if the land of the Pharos wins the 2026 African Championship, it will tie Tunisia with ten gold medals in this competition but still trail in the overall medal count.

However, we are seeing the emergence of a new contender on this continent, and that is Cape Verder, whose handball squad bears the name the Blue Sharks. Cape Verde is an African island country on ten volcanic islands that has a population of around half a million. It is hard to find data on when precisely this tiny nation put together a handball team, but they first qualified for the African Men’s Championship in 2020, when the competition expanded the number of participants to sixteen. They shocked everyone by taking third place in that tournament and qualified for the 2021 World Championship, from which they withdrew due to not having enough players after several of the squad’s members contracted COVID. The following year, in 2022, they upset Angola by one goal in the quarterfinals and beat Morocco handily in the semis before running into favorite Egypt in the finals and getting destroyed. Still, it was a super impressive run from a super young team from a small country with essentially no handball track record.

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