Cristina Neagu
Ivano Balic
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Ivano Balic leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Cristina Neagu at #5 and Ivano Balic at #6.
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 Ivano Balic
For roughly five years in the mid-2000s, the most inventive player anyone had seen. Balic was a centre back who built his game on deception rather than power - a step-back fake that froze an entire defensive line, a no-look pass to a pivot he could not possibly have seen - and he was named IHF World Player of the Year in 2003 and 2006. He was the outstanding player of the 2003 World Championship, which Croatia won at home in Zagreb, and of the Athens 2004 Olympic tournament, which Croatia also won. With him as the fulcrum Croatia added world silver in 2005 and 2009 and European silver in 2008 and 2010, a run of near misses that would define a lesser player. In an IHF online poll in 2010 he was voted the best handball player of all time, a verdict that says as much about how he played as about what he won. Coaches still show his footage to teach the value of the pause.