Mikkel Hansen
Anita Gorbicz
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Mikkel Hansen leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Mikkel Hansen at #2 and Anita Gorbicz at #11.
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The case for Mikkel Hansen
The defining backcourt shooter of the 2010s and the player who turned Denmark from a good handball nation into the dominant one. Hansen won the IHF World Player of the Year award three times, in 2011, 2015 and 2018, matching the men's record, and collected Olympic gold in Rio in 2016 as the tournament's leading scorer, silver in Tokyo, and gold again in Paris in 2024 in the last match of his career. He was central to three consecutive world titles, in 2019, 2021 and 2023, and his European Championship came in 2012, when Denmark beat Serbia in Belgrade and he was named the tournament's most valuable player. A left-hander who shot from well beyond nine metres with a flat, ferocious release and passed like a playmaker, he won the Champions League with Barcelona in 2011 and then spent a decade as the axis of Paris Saint-Germain. He is Denmark's record international scorer and retired at 36.
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.