Cristina Neagu
Anja Andersen
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Anja Andersen leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Cristina Neagu at #5 and Anja Andersen at #8.
The case for Cristina Neagu
The only player of either sex to win the IHF World Player of the Year award four times, in 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2018, and the all-time leading scorer in the EHF Champions League. Neagu is the argument that individual greatness and team silverware are separable. Romania have not won a major senior title in her lifetime, and their best result in her era was World Championship bronze in 2015, a tournament in which she was both top scorer and most valuable player. At club level she won three Champions Leagues, with Buducnost in 2012 and 2015 and CSM Bucuresti in 2016, and she has scored more than 1,000 goals for Romania. A left back who shoots from a standing position with a whip-like release rather than a jump, she twice ruptured a cruciate ligament, in 2012 and 2018, and both times came back to win the world award. In a sport dominated by a handful of federations, she is its most celebrated individual from outside them.
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.