The hand ball World Cup is on at the moment.
Handball is very popular in FRance, last night there were 9m TV spectators for the France / Sweden match and a 28k crowd.

Although minnows comapared to Rugby their stats are impressive.
Here's a self explanatory (some easy translation on major topics eg Budgets, affluences = gates, licences, TV rights, TV audiences etc) comparison ...

as can be seen their TV audience is high but revenue low.
their crowd levels not bad and their player numbers are greater than rugby at 519k v 456k



Other minority sports like Judo also do very well in France.

The image was published Jan 16 this year and I have posted it because it does give a comparison of some sports with surprising popular competition levels. This has been discussed in other debates on here too.

Of course footy still dominates but Rugby is making some inroads there and there are examples where Rugby Top14 Clubs do compete better with Footy Div1 especially in the big matches where they can exceed footy levels.