Handball (team handball) in 2016: Throw-off, throw-in and free throw

France, with 6 (1995, 2001, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2017) Handball is the highest-scoring team sport played indoors. Seven against seven on a court 40 metres long and 20 wide, two halves of thirty minutes, and a final score that routinely passes sixty goals between the two sides. The premise is simple: carry, bounce or pass a ball small enough to palm in one hand, take no more than three steps between dribbles, and throw it past a goalkeeper defending a frame three metres wide and two high. The complication is the six-metre arc in front of that goal, which no field player may stand in. Every shot is therefore taken from distance or launched from the air above the line, which gives the sport its signature image: a player suspended mid-flight over the crease.

Its heartland is continental Europe. Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Croatia and Hungary treat handball as a first-tier national sport, and the German Handball-Bundesliga fills arenas week after week. When Germany played Switzerland in Duesseldorf at the 2024 European Championship, 53,586 people came, a world record for the sport. The International Handball Federation counts roughly 27 million players across more than 200 member federations, and the map is widening: Egypt reached the Olympic semifinals in Tokyo, Qatar reached a World Championship final in 2015, and Brazil's women won the world title outright in 2013. Handball is Europe's biggest indoor sport and, quietly, one of the most played games on Earth.

Athletically it sits somewhere between basketball and rugby. Backcourt players jump into contact to shoot from nine metres, pivots wrestle for position with their backs to goal, and wings finish from angles so tight that the geometry, not the goalkeeper, is the real opponent. Defending is a contact discipline with legal limits: a defender may use a bent arm and the torso to block an attacker's path, so the game is played at collision speed with almost no stoppages. Substitutions flow on and off the court without the referee's permission, possessions last seconds, and momentum swings in bursts of three and four unanswered goals that coaches burn timeouts to stop.