Anja Andersen
Anita Gorbicz
Stat by stat
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The verdict
Anja Andersen leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Anja Andersen at #8 and Anita Gorbicz at #11.
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The case for Anja Andersen
Handball's great disruptor. Andersen played centre back for Denmark with a combination of technical genius and open provocation - she talked, she gestured, she attempted shots nobody else would consider - and she was the engine of the team that changed the women's game. Denmark won the European Championship in 1994 and 1996, Olympic gold in Atlanta in 1996 and the world title in 1997, the year Andersen was named IHF World Player of the Year. Then it stopped: a heart condition forced her retirement in 1998 at 29, at the peak of her powers. She moved straight into coaching and was just as successful and just as combustible, building Slagelse into a European power that won successive Champions League titles in 2004 and 2005 while collecting bans of her own along the way. Denmark's women went on to win three consecutive Olympic golds from 1996 to 2004; Andersen started it.
The case for Anita Gorbicz
The one-club great. Gorbicz spent essentially her entire career at Gyori Audi ETO KC, turning a Hungarian provincial club into the dominant force in European women's handball and winning five Champions League titles there - in 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019 - alongside a long series of Hungarian league and cup doubles. She was named IHF World Player of the Year in 2005, at 22, after Hungary took bronze at the World Championship, and she stands among the highest-scoring players in Champions League history. A centre back with an exceptionally quick first step, she built her game on beating the first defender and then playing the pivot in, and she was the reference point for the position in the women's game for fifteen years. Hungary never converted her talent into a major title - fourth at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 was the closest they came - which is why she is better known inside the sport than outside it.