  The study aims to compare different designs for the World Men's Handball
Championships. This event, organised in every two years, has adopted four
hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round-robin stages in recent decades,
including a change of design between the two recent championships in 2017 and
2019. They are evaluated under two extremal seeding policies with respect to
various outcome measures through Monte-Carlo simulations. We find that the
ability to give the first four positions to the strongest teams, as well as the
expected quality and outcome uncertainty of the final is not necessarily a
monotonic function of the number of matches played: the most frugal format is
the second best with respect to these outcome measures, making it a good
compromise in an unavoidable trade-off. A possible error is identified in a
particular design. The relative performance of the formats is independent of
the seeding rules and the competitive balance of the teams. The recent reform
is demonstrated to have increased the probability of winning for the top teams.
Our results have useful implications for the organisers of hybrid tournaments.
