Is Left-Handedness Associated With Greater Success From the 7-Meter Line? An Analysis of 7-Meter Records Across Various Handball Competitions

Introduction

Several investigators have found that being left-handed can be advantageous in some sports, resulting in an overrepresentation of left-handers among elite athletes (Chance & Maymin, 2023; Connor et al., 2020; Harris, 2016; Loffing, Schorer, et al., 2012; Loffing & Hagemann, 2015, 2016; Richardson & Gilman, 2019). While different explanations for this lateral bias have been proposed, there has been a growing consensus that lateral advantages result from innate abilities or negative frequency-dependent factors (Groothuis et al., 2013; Loffing & Hagemann, 2016). In other words, left-handers either perform better because they are genetically predisposed to having quicker reactions, being more aggressive, and having better spatial awareness than right-handers, or they have an advantage because their movement patterns are infrequent and less easily recognized by opponents (Loffing & Hagemann, 2016). However, there are indications that both innate abilities and negative frequency-dependent advantages may play a joint role in explaining the advantage (Loffing & Hagemann, 2015; Pollet et al., 2013; Witkowski et al., 2019).

Previous work from various sports has shown that the significance of lateral biases can vary with sport context and such athlete variables as proficiency level, sex, and weight-class, among other factors (Dochtermann et al., 2014; Loffing, 2017; Loffing & Hagemann, 2015, 2016), indicating that the underlying mechanisms for lateral biases are complex and multifaceted. Richardson and Gilman (2019) also postulated that their chosen statistical approach (i.e., analyzing individual records as opposed to individual events) was at least partially responsible for their findings, suggesting that different statistical approaches should be explored before drawing any definitive conclusions about possible relationships between laterality and sporting success.

Handball is an interesting context in which to study laterality, because this sport relies on highly one-sided movement patterns that may offer inherent tactical benefits to left-handers. All teams strive to have two left-handers on the court at any time, since players who throw with their left hand have favorable shooting angles on the right side of the field. These presumed tactical advantages, coupled with the relative paucity of left-handers in society, ensure that left-handers are favored during selection processes (Baker et al., 2013; Karcher & Buchheit, 2017; Papadatou-Pastou et al., 2020).

However, the 7-meter shot is one action during handball games where there are no presumed handedness-related angular advantages, since 7-meter shots are executed from a fixed angle, and as the name indicates, are always seven meters from the goal. This free penalty shot is awarded to the attacking team when a defender robs them illicitly of a clear goal scoring opportunity. No defenders are allowed to interfere with the shot, leaving only the goalkeeper to obstruct it and prevent a goal from being scored. Since 7-meter shots make up a substantial number of shots in any given game (Laxdal, Ivarsson, Sigurgeirsson, & Haugen, 2022), and the likelihood of scoring from a 7-meter shot is quite high (Laxdal et al., 2024), 7-meter shooters should be chosen with care and deliberation.

Even though left-handed handballers are expected to be overrepresented when compared to their frequency in the general population, they appear to take a disproportionately large proportion of 7-meter shots, meaning that coaches are more likely to place left-handers than right-handers at the 7-meter line (Laxdal et al., 2022b, 2023; Lobinger et al., 2014). However, when looking past their overrepresentation, previous investigators have not found left-handers to be more likely to score from 7-meter shots than right-handers (Laxdal et al., 2022b, 2023), signalling that coaches may be choosing best shooters, regardless of their handedness. In line with Richardson and Gilman’s (2019) arguments, we sought to test whether analyzing a sample of players’ indvidual records instead of a sample of 7-meter events would yield different 7-meter success rates between left-handers and right-handersand shed new light on this relationship. Seeing as any advantages were likely to be small, we utilzed larger datasets than have been tested before to increase statistical power for detecting small effect sizes.

Our overall aim was to examine the 7-meter records of elite 7-meter shooters to examine: (a) whether left-handed shooters were overrepresented in this sub-group compared to their expected representation, (b) the relationship between throwing hand and success at the 7-meter line, and (c) whether there were any sex-differences in left-handed versus right-handed success rates. We used a two-study approach based on two different large data samples. We examined shooters from the Danish and Norwegian elite divisions from 2015-2023 in Study I, and we examined shooters from all European Championships, World Championships and Olympics from 2009-2023 in Study II.

We chose the Danish and Norwegian leagues for Study I for two reasons. First, these leagues are among the very best in the world, currently sitting in the 1st, 5th, 5th, and 9th place on their respective EHF coefficients (European Handball Federation, 2023). Second, the data available on 7-meter shots on two websites, https://www.tophaandbold.dk/ and https://www.handball.no/, represent some of the largest longitudinal public domain collections of 7-meter shooter records at the club level. We chose the European Championship, the World Championship and the Olympics for Study II, as they are the pinnacle championships of national team handball, and the 7-meter records of all shooters from the most recent tournaments are available online (on the official websites of the European Handball Federation and the International Handball Federation, respectively).

Method

Results

Discussion

In this study we explored whether being left-handed was advantageous for handballers taking 7-meter shots. In line with Laxdal, Ivarsson, Þorgeirsson, and Haugen (2022) and Lobinger et al. (2014), we found left-handed males to be overrepresented among 7-meter shooters at the world class level. This stands in contrast to Laxdal et al.’s (2023) findings of sub-elite males who were not overrepresented. We did not find elite left-handed females to be overrepresented, which was at odds with Laxdal et al. (2023). Nevertheless, our findings were generally in line with those of previous investigators of left-handedness in various sports, where handedness was found to be less consequential for females than for males (e.g., Baker et al., 2013; Li, 2014; Loffing, Hagemann, & Strauss, 2012; Raymond et al., 1996; Richardson & Gilman, 2019). Packheiser et al. (2019) suggested that this may be because left-handed males are less lateralized than left-handed females.

Regarding the relationship between throwing arm and success from the 7-meter line, we found no indications of lateral biases. This failure to find a laterality performance bias for 7-meter throws is congruent with previous investigators’ results at various proficiency levels (Laxdal et al., 2022b, 2023) using different methodologies. Collectively, these results indicate that the advantages left-handers were presumed to have in the selection process do not translate to performance execution (i.e., success from 7-meter throws). In other words, the best right- and left-handed 7-meter shooters were similarly effective from the 7-meter line.

The selection of 7-meter shooters is somewhat opaque since most of the selection process takes place in training. Of course, players’ in-game performances are likely to impact their ranking (Laxdal et al., 2024), but the small number of eligible 7-meter shooters are usually predetermined by the coach. Eligible shooters have likely been taking 7-meter throws for most of their career, and their eligibility as 7-meter shooters in the games studied here was therefore, largely the result of previous selections that occurred earlier in their careers. Since left-handers have been found to have a greater advantage at the amateur level than at the professional level in tennis (Loffing, Hagemann, & Strauss, 2012), one could argue that 7-meter shooters’ youth records may be more heavily colored by lateral biases than these professional level records. In fact, many of the goalkeepers these 7-meter shooters played against during their formative years were likely to have much less relative experience playing against left-handers than professional goalkeepers have. But this is perhaps where comparing a specific action in a complex team sport to an action in individual contests like tennis or mixed martial arts comes up short.

Since Loffing (2017) found a positive relationship between time pressure and lateral biases in interactive sports, one would expect to see this effect in the 7-meter throw. The ball travels too fast for the goalkeeper to react to it, meaning that the goalkeeper must anticipate the ball’s trajectory, based on the shooter’s movements (Cocić et al., 2021; Schorer et al., 2018). In fact, Loffing et al. (2015) found that goalkeepers performed worse when trying to anticipate the throws of left-handers than the throws of right-handers. Interestingly, it was not the goalkeeper’s gaze behavior or the reaction time that appeared to be the deciding factor, but rather the time it took to interpret or categorize the throw information (Loffing et al., 2015).

Mesagno et al. (2019) found indications that left-handers were better equipped to handle pressure and were less impacted by high-pressure moments than their right-handed counterparts. Since 7-meter throws are inherently stressful, as all eyes are on the shooter and the expectancy of scoring is high, left-handers would be expected to perform better if their innate ability to thrive under pressure made them more likely to score. Then again, Bühren and Gabriel (2023) found that 7-meter shooters generally thrived under pressure. Their findings were corroborated by Debanne et al. (2018) who found that 7-meter shooters were not impacted by the weight of the situation and were equally effective, irrespective of the criticality of the shot.

Conclusion

Our findings underline the complexities associated with studying handedness biases in sports. While being left-handed was not directly advantageous for successful 7-meter throws, the overrepresentation of left-handers among 7-meter throwers indicates that lateral biases played some role in the coaches’ selection processes. It is unclear whether the sex differences found in this study were context-dependent or related to the level of competition (i.e., elite vs. sub-elite).