Sevenska Spel make early payment ‘to help safeguard Handball’ amid COVID-19

Marketing

Svenska Spel has made an early sponsorship payment to the Swedish Handball Association and the Swedish Elite Handball of SEK 5.3 million.

This improves short-term liquidity, especially for the country’s highest leagues, Handball League and SHE.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit the Swedish sports movement hard. Suspended matches, championships and leagues have made the economy in both federations and associations strained. For the handball, the entire SM playoffs were canceled and the tables, which they looked like when the decision was made, also became final tables. As a result, large sources of income for many of the elite clubs also disappeared.

Svenska Spel is the main sponsor of the handball and has now chosen to pay out half of this year’s contract sum, a total of SEK 5,300,000, a month earlier than originally planned. 

This spring has been very tough for the whole sports movement and nobody knows when we will get out of this difficult situation and in what way we will do it. That is why we at Svenska Spel want to do what we can to make it easier for our partners in sports. In April, for example, we arranged the payment of SEK 20 million to over 3,600 sports associations affiliated with our sponsorship project Gräsroten, and now we choose to pay SEK 5.3 million in advance to the Swedish handball movement. In this way, we do what we can to make the sport continue to live even in a very difficult time, says Nicklas  Biverståhl , Sponsorship Manager at Svenska Spel.

We are very pleased that our main sponsor Svenska Spel in this way can help to improve the liquidity of our associations. It is a tough period and every way to make it easier for our associations to be able to conduct their business is very grateful, Robert Wedberg, Secretary-General of the Swedish Handball Association.

This is not the only initiative taken this spring to strengthen the financial situation of elite clubs. In early April, the Swedish Elite Handball, Handball League (men), SHE (women) and Svenska Spel jointly decided that the bonus to be distributed to the SM finalists , both men’s and women’s teams, would be distributed equally among all teams in each league. A total of 26 teams thus shared SEK 300,000. 

It was a way of helping to improve the financial situation of all clubs, and it felt most fair considering that we could not pick SM winners based on our usual sporting bases with an endgame. And this is another example of how we all work to make the situation as good as possible for our associations, says Peter Gentzel, CEO of Swedish Elite Handball.  

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