High Expectations for Floorball Championships -- Federations Focus

(ATR) The 12th Men’s World Floorball Championships return to Prague for a third time beginning on Saturday.

International Floorball Federation (IFF) Secretary General John Liljelund tells Around the Rings the expectations for the tournament are high.

"We are now estimating some 140,000 plus total number of spectators for the whole event, with over 90 percent sales," he says, adding that the local organizing committee "has run a very successful school campaign all over the country and that will bring a lot of spectators for the weekdays".

Liljelund believes "both the one game record and the overall event spectator record will most likely be broken".

For the first time, organizers are running Fan Zones not only in the host city but in all the provincial capitals all over the Czech Republic, helping to grow the sport on both a national and international level.

The 16-team Men’s World Floorball Championships run from December 1-9. Finland is the defending champion, having beaten Sweden in a penalty shootout in the 2016 final.

ATR will have a full preview of the event later this week.

2018 ISSF General Assembly Begins Friday

The International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) holds its General Assembly this Friday and Saturday in Munich, Germany.

Top of the agenda will be electing the federation’s first new president since 1980.

Three candidates are running to replace Olegorio Vazquez Rana, who has served as president of the ISSF for the past 38 years.

Russian Vladimir Lisin, European Shooting Confederation president, is Rana’s choice to be his successor.

ISSF vice president Luciano Rossi of Italy and Boutros Jalkh, President of the Lebanon Shooting and Hunting Federation, are the other challengers.

Rossi won an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport earlier this year that reduced his three year ban by the ISSF Ethics Committee to 20 weeks, allowing him to run for president. CAS did uphold the ISSF finding Rossi guilty of "serious breaches" of the federation’s code of ethics.

In addition to choosing a new president, elections for vice presidents, secretary general and administrative council will also be held during the General Assembly.

ITTF and Deloitte Join Forces for 2021

The International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) announces on Wednesday that it is teaming up with the Sports Business Group of Deloitte to create a commercial rights tender from 2021.

"We have a unique opportunity to be going to market with all of our commercial rights simultaneously. This allows the ITTF to market its rights in a flexible and innovative way to ensure that we find the right partners to take table tennis to the next commercial level from 2021 onwards and also for the ITTF to gain market value for its commercial rights, which has not been in the case in the past,"ITTF CEO Steve Dainton said in a statement.

"We are looking forward to working with Deloitte to make this happen."

The ITTF and Deloitte have been working together since 2016. That collaboration has resulted in an expansion of the World Table Tennis Championships, approved by the ITTF Board of Directors in 2017, and a shift in philosophy of how the ITTF runs its World Tour. Both changes will come into effect in 2021 and will have a significant impact on the commercial value of both properties going forward, according to the federation.

As part of Wednesday’s announcement, the ITTF said it plans to release the tender for the commercial rights towards the end of the first quarter of 2019, with a partner or group of partners selected by the third quarter.

Written by Gerard Farek

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