Ivano Balic
Jackson Richardson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jackson Richardson leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Ivano Balic at #6 and Jackson Richardson at #12.
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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.
The case for Jackson Richardson
The face of French handball before France became a superpower. Born on Reunion, Richardson was a centre back of dazzling acceleration and improvisation who was named IHF World Player of the Year in 1995, the year Les Barjots won France's first world title in Iceland. He won a second with the next generation, Les Costauds, in 2001 on home soil, and bracketed his career with Olympic medals sixteen years apart: bronze at Barcelona in 1992 and, at 39, gold at Beijing in 2008 in his final tournament, the medal that three decades of French handball had been building toward. His dreadlocks, his refusal to leave the French league for most of his prime and his status as the first genuinely famous handball player in France made him a national figure well beyond the sport. Everything France won in the decade after 2008 was built on foundations he laid.