THE EFFECT OF ORGANIZING MAJOR SPORTS EVENTS ON PUBLIC INTEREST IN SPORT – EXAMPLE OF THE 2018 EUROPEAN HANDBALL CHAMPIONSHIP ANALISED WITH GOOGLE TRENDS TOOL

The European Handball Championship (EHC), along with the Olympic Games and the World Championships, is the largest sports event in handball. In everyday practice, there is a need for exact measuring of interest for some activity or sport in a particular geographical area. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of the organization of the 2018 EHC on public interest in Handball in the territory of the Republic of Croatia. Keywords entered into an Internet search engine can be a useful resource for analyzing the public interest. For the purposes of this study we used the Google Trends network tool for detecting interests before, during and after the EHC. The results show that the greatest interest for handball was expressed in Varaždin county, whereas the 5 top cities were: Varaždin (100%), followed by Osijek (63%), Zagreb (61%), Split (55%), and Rijeka (52%). The presented results show that the organization of major sports events as the EHC affects the increase of interest, and in the analyzed case the interest during the EHC increased up to twenty times compared to the average values (3.14% max values) that occur during the analyzed period.