Compared to the past 20 years, the number of teams participating in the World Men’s Handball Championship has increased and the number of games has increased. The top players in the world play a considerable number of games for their clubs. Therefore, it has become almost impossible to play a single match with only certain fixed members or to play many matches throughout the tournament from the viewpoints of players’ physical strength and injury prevention. In addition, the rules of handball games do not restrict the replacement of players, and the players can be replaced freely at any time and by any number of players during the game. This is a characteristic of handball. From the above point of view, substitution of players is an important factor. There is a measure of inequality called Gini coefficient used in economics and sociology. It is mainly used to measure inequality in income and wealth distribution. In this study, the Gini coefficient is modified to correspond to handball, and the purpose of this study is to propose an index using the Gini coefficient to quantify the imbalance in the playing time of bench players of a team in a single game. The handball version of Gini coefficient was calculated for 497 games (6 tournaments) of the Men’s Handball World Championship from 2013 to 2023 to identify the disproportionality of playing time of players on the bench.
The results suggest that the value of Gini coefficient was smaller in the World Men’s Handball Championships after 2019 than in the earlier tournaments, and that the imbalance of playing time of the players on the bench was smaller. In addition, the larger the difference in the ability of the opponents, the lower the value of the Gini coefficient devised in this study.
The Gini coefficient for handball, which was developed in this study, is an index that reveals the imbalance of playing time of players on the bench, and this index can be used to understand the characteristics of playing time of players on each team, to fix players on the court from among the bench players in the handball team, and to objectively determine the degree of sharing of playing time. This index enables us to understand the characteristics of the playing time of players on each team and to objectively determine the degree of fixation of players on the court and the degree of sharing of playing time among the bench players in a handball team.
