Turning a handball opening match into a community moment — with a song, a call to participate, and 53,586 people singing along.
Junior Concept Creative at DO IT! GmbH, working in close collaboration with Creative Director Sebastian Heise. My contribution was in the initial concept development phase: the overall strategic structure, the music-as-connective-tissue idea, the participation mechanics, and the artist recommendation.
The Men’s EHF EURO 2024 was a historic occasion: the first EHF EURO with 24 teams, hosted in Germany, with the opening match at the MERKUR SPIEL-ARENA in Düsseldorf set to become a Guinness World Record attempt for the largest live handball audience. The DHB wanted to match that ambition not just sportively, but emotionally — generating excitement well before the first whistle, activating the handball community and reaching beyond it into the general public.
The task: develop a concept that gives the opening match the emotional charge the occasion deserves — and that reaches beyond the people in the arena.
A one-off spectacular for over 50,000 people in an arena is a closed loop. It creates a moment for those present — and leaves everyone else watching from the outside. For an event of this scale, that felt like a missed opportunity.
The real challenge was structural: how do you build toward an opening moment so that it’s not a one-hit-wonder for the people in the arena, but the emotional peak of a larger story that has already been building — one that pulls the handball community, sports fans, and the general public into the same moment?
The answer was to treat the opening match not as a standalone event, but as the highlight-momentum of a pre-event-post activation campaign. The celebration would be the climax of something the community had already participated in — not a spectacle they watched, but a moment they had helped create.
Music was the structural connective tissue. A song that travels across channels, invites participation, builds anticipation, and then reaches its live premiere on the night of the opening match — with 53,586 people in the arena singing along to something they already knew.
The mechanics: a pre-activation starting in autumn 2023, anchored by the music video release and a participation call across social media, with two tickets to win for the opening matchday on 10 January at the MERKUR Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf – including a meet and greet with Culcha Candela. Fans, handball players and youth teams were invited to sing, dance, and share their own performances using the song — with youth teams as the primary driver due to their higher social media affinity. The best contributions would be integrated into a Fan Edition of the music video, released after the opening match. The song’s live premiere at the opening ceremony would be the moment everything converged.
The song concept required the right artist — someone with enough cultural recognition to carry the idea beyond the handball community, but authentic enough not to feel like a corporate booking. It needed Culcha Candela on ‘Celebration’.
The EHF EURO 2024 operated with a modular claim system — “Here to Play”, “Here to Celebrate”, and variations thereof. “Celebration” translated one of those claims directly into something you could sing, dance to, and share. The song didn’t illustrate the theme — it was the theme, made tangible.
“Celebration” by Kool & the Gang was the source material: a universally known track that nobody needs explained, but that could be recontextualized for handball and the EHF EURO 2024. Culcha Candela was recommended as the act to reinterpret it — a German group with genuine multicultural energy, strong live presence, and an existing connection to football and sport culture.
Two videos that bracketed the campaign — the official music video that launched it, and the Fan Edition that closed it on opening night.
