Magnus Wislander
Anita Gorbicz
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Magnus Wislander leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Magnus Wislander at #3 and Anita Gorbicz at #11.
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The case for Magnus Wislander
Voted Handball Player of the Century by the IHF in 2000, and the man who turned the pivot from a body into a position. A line player with a playmaker's hands, Wislander scored, screened and passed out of the six-metre chaos for THW Kiel across twelve seasons, winning the run of Bundesliga titles that made Kiel the biggest club in the sport. With Sweden's Bengan Boys he won world titles in 1990 and 1999 and four consecutive European Championships in 1994, 1998, 2000 and 2002, still the record for a men's national team. The gap in the record is the largest in handball history: Sweden lost three Olympic finals in a row, to the Unified Team in 1992, Croatia in 1996 and Russia in 2000, and Wislander finished close to 400 internationals with three silver medals and no gold. Ask coaches which pre-2000 player they would build a team around and his name still comes first.
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.