Cristina Neagu
Talant Dujshebaev
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Cristina Neagu at #5 and Talant Dujshebaev at #10.
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 Talant Dujshebaev
Born in Frunze in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, Dujshebaev won Olympic gold with the Unified Team in 1992, took Spanish citizenship, and then won Olympic bronze for Spain in 1996 and 2000 - a career that traced the political redrawing of the sport. He was named IHF World Player of the Year twice, in 1994 and 1996, as a centre back of unusual physical power who could shoot from nine metres and defend the middle of a 6-0 for a full match, a combination that barely exists now. He spent his best club years in Spain with Teka Santander and Ciudad Real, in the period when the Spanish league was the strongest in the world. His second career made him more influential still: as a coach he took Kielce to the Champions League title in 2016, and both his sons, Alex and Daniel, became Spanish internationals. Few people have shaped three handball nations.