HISTORY OF HANDBALL

Games similar to modern team handball have historically been played in many different cultures around the world. We do for instance know that the ancient Greeks and Romans played a type of handball, and handball was also played by the Inuit in Greenland and the French in Europe as early as the Middle Ages.

Team handball as we know it today developed in northern Europe by the end of the 1800s. Specially in countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany.

 In 1926, the Congress of the International Amateur Athletics Federation nominated a committee to draw up international rules for field handball. Two years later, the International Amateur Handball Federation was founded.

Men's handball world championship premiered in 1938 before going on hiatus until the end of World War II. It then was played every 4 (sometimes 3) years to 1995. Since the 1995 world championship in Iceland, the world championship has been in biannual event. The first women's handball world championship took place in 1957.

On July 11, 1946, the International Handball Federation (IHF) was formed at the initiative and invitation of Denmark and Sweden. The founding members of the new federation was France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, and – of course – Denmark and Sweden. The IHF replaced the International Amateur Handball Federation (IAHF). Today, the IHF has nearly 170 members and governs about 795,000 teams worldwide.