Three-Letter Country Abbreviations for Handball Scoreboards
Decode DEN, GER, CRO and other three-letter country abbreviations in handball, and see where sports codes differ from ISO alpha-3 codes.
Three-letter abbreviations in handball identify national teams in scoreboards, standings and match files. The important catch is that a sports code is not necessarily the country’s ISO alpha-3 code.
For example, an official IHF ranking uses DEN for Denmark, GER for Germany and CRO for Croatia. The corresponding ISO alpha-3 codes are DNK, DEU and HRV. ISO describes alpha-3 as a three-letter representation usually related closely to the country name, but that does not make every three-letter sports abbreviation an ISO code (ISO).
Common handball country codes
The table below starts with the 32 teams in the IHF’s final ranking for the 2023 Men’s World Championship (IHF). “Handball code” reproduces the identifier in that IHF ranking; “ISO alpha-3” shows the separate code published in the UN Statistics Division’s country table (UN Statistics Division).
| Handball code | Country/team | ISO alpha-3 |
|---|---|---|
| ALG | Algeria | DZA |
| ARG | Argentina | ARG |
| BEL | Belgium | BEL |
| BRA | Brazil | BRA |
| BRN | Bahrain | BHR |
| CHI | Chile | CHL |
| CPV | Cabo Verde | CPV |
| CRO | Croatia | HRV |
| CZE | Czechia | CZE |
| DEN | Denmark | DNK |
| EGY | Egypt | EGY |
| ESP | Spain | ESP |
| FRA | France | FRA |
| GER | Germany | DEU |
| HUN | Hungary | HUN |
| IRI | Iran | IRN |
| ISL | Iceland | ISL |
| KOR | Republic of Korea | KOR |
| KSA | Saudi Arabia | SAU |
| MAR | Morocco | MAR |
| MKD | North Macedonia | MKD |
| MNE | Montenegro | MNE |
| NED | Netherlands | NLD |
| NOR | Norway | NOR |
| POL | Poland | POL |
| POR | Portugal | PRT |
| QAT | Qatar | QAT |
| SLO | Slovenia | SVN |
| SRB | Serbia | SRB |
| SWE | Sweden | SWE |
| TUN | Tunisia | TUN |
| URU | Uruguay | URY |
| USA | United States | USA |
The quickest way to use the table is to treat the first column as the scoreboard key. Use the ISO column only when joining handball results to a general country dataset.
Why DEN and GER are not DNK and DEU
ISO 3166 offers alpha-2, alpha-3 and numeric-3 country codes; ISO says alpha-2 is the general-purpose form, while alpha-3 is more closely related to the country name (ISO). Sports organizations maintain display conventions of their own. The Olympic code list, for example, gives Denmark as DEN, Germany as GER, Croatia as CRO, the Netherlands as NED and Switzerland as SUI (Olympics.com).
That distinction matters when cleaning historical results. Replacing every handball code with an ISO code before saving the original can break joins, searches and audit trails. A safer structure has three fields:
| team_name | competition_code | iso_alpha3 |
|---|---|---|
| Denmark | DEN | DNK |
| Germany | GER | DEU |
| Croatia | CRO | HRV |
Keep competition_code exactly as published, then map it to a normalized country field. This also protects against confusing a federation or Olympic delegation with a state or territory in another coding system.
How to read a handball score line
In GER 26:39 DEN, the code before each number identifies the team and the number is its final goal total: Germany 26, Denmark 39. Olympics.com records that exact score for the Paris 2024 men’s gold-medal match and states that Denmark won (Olympics.com).
The three letters do not by themselves tell you whether the result is men’s or women’s, senior or youth, indoor or beach handball. Preserve the competition, sex/category, stage and date beside every score. For longer national-team histories, the same discipline is useful when reading our World Championship top-four results by nation, EHF EURO top-four results by nation and Olympic handball results by nation.