The fourth edition of the South and Central American Men's Handball Championship will take place between 19 and 24 January 2026 in Asuncion, Paraguay, and it will be a qualification event for the 2027 IHF Men’s World Championship.

Six teams will line up at the start of the competition, including the winners of the previous three editions – Argentina and Brazil – with Chile, hosts Paraguay, Uruguay and debutants Peru completing the line-up.

The competition will be played in a round-robin format, with every team facing each other, and the team with the largest number of points clinching the title.

In the first edition of the South and Central American Men's Handball Championship, played in 2020, in Maringá, Brazil, Argentina won the title thanks to a 25:24 win in the last match of the competition.

Two years later, in Recife, Brazil, the hosts crawled their way back and secured a 20:17 win in the final against Argentina, to lift the trophy. A feature which was repeated in 2024, when in Buenos Aires, Brazil earned a 26:24 win in the final round of the competition to secure their second title.

Brazil will once again be favoured to win the title, after their best performance in history at the IHF Men’s World Championship in 2025, when they ended up on the seventh place, after becoming the first South American side in history to secure a place in the quarter-finals of the competition.

They are riding a 10-match winning streak at the South and Central American Men's Handball Championship, having lost only one of the 15 matches played and outplaying opponents by an average margin of 23.5 goals in those matches.

The decider looks set to be the one between Brazil and Argentina, scheduled on 24 January, the last match to be played in the competition. Argentina have lost two matches so far in the history of the competition, but they are undergoing a makeover, with several young players making the squad, after the retirement of key players like Diego Simonet.

While Chile and Uruguay have always fought for medals in the previous three editions, Paraguay will be looking for their best-ever finish. They ended up fifth in the first two editions of the South and Central American Men's Handball Championship and in the previous edition they ended up on the fourth place. On the other hand, Peru will make their debut at the continental competition.

The South and Central American Men's Handball Championship is a qualification event for the 2027 IHF Men’s World Championship. After Brazil finished eighth in the previous edition of the world handball flagship competition, the continent has now four teams qualifying, therefore the top four teams in the 2026 South and Central American Men's Handball Championship will make it to Germany 2027.

This is the second phase of the qualification pathway for the continent at the 2027 IHF Men’s World Championship, with the previous one seeing competitions played at the Central America level and at the South America level. The first one saw five teams playing, while the latter one was played in December, with six teams participating and Chile winning the title.