On the final day of Germany 2017, three press conferences took place including the Germany 2017 Closing Press Conference, 2019 IHF Men’s World Championship - Germany/Denmark Press Conference and 2019 IHF Women’s World Championship – Japan Press Conference.

IHF.info brings you all the statements and facts from all three – with the second press conference featuring representatives of the 2019 IHF Men’s World Championship which will be played in Germany and Denmark from 10-27 January.

We are two long-lasting handball cultures and have had a long-lasting cooperation with the DHB, and we are also neighbours. 

The only problem we have internally is who invented handball back in history. In Denmark we say we invented it and so did Germany, but I think 7v7 was from Denmark and 11 v11 was from Germany – whatever the case, we are close friends and are both looking forward to 2019.

Every championship has two important ingredients – the players and the fans and we are looking forward to having a mascot created by fans across the world. 

We wanted to create an outstanding event and want to make a new spectator attendance record. We want to bring people together and show that we are making one event and not two events in two countries - it should be one World Championship. All of our arenas are more than 10,000-capacity so we can really make a record if it works.

We want to do that by having an outstanding design and have prepared a schedule where we come together through our venues. We have, in Germany, venues in the north – Hamburg, east – Berlin, south – Munich and west – Cologne and in Denmark we have Copenhagen and Herning, for the final.

We started last Thursday with the Christmas pre-sale and have 1,000 tickets available in every venue for every day - the first phase, and it started quite good. 

We have already sold a lot of tickets here in Hamburg and Copenhagen so if you want to have some tickets in this phase you need to hurry.  Our second sales phase will be after the IHF site visits at the beginning of 2018. This will be for day tickets for venues, as currently we are only selling venue packages - all games at each venue, although Herning and Copenhagen are already selling day tickets. 

The draw will be in June 2018 and after that we will have the ‘all-in phase’, where all the tickets can be sold to our international friends because by then we will know the nations who will take part.

Maybe if there are some tickets left we will have some special things at the end of 2018, but hopefully this is not necessary.

Organising this World Championship helps a lot - we learnt a lot and our team learnt a lot. We had a lot of people working on this championship and they did a very good job. 

We have very good friends from Denmark and they are professionals in organising because they did many times before so we can learn from them and I think we have a good relationship now – we are moving closer to them after organising our own World Championship here.