Thierry Omeyer
Jackson Richardson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Thierry Omeyer leads 3 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Thierry Omeyer at #7 and Jackson Richardson at #12.
Head-to-head FAQ
Who leads more shared metrics?
How do the published ranks compare?
Are these live stats?
The case for Thierry Omeyer
Routinely named by his peers as the best goalkeeper the sport has had, and the spine of the most successful national team ever assembled. Omeyer won Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012 and silver in 2016, four world titles with France (2009, 2011, 2015 and 2017) and three European Championships (2006, 2010 and 2014), and was IHF World Player of the Year in 2008, an award goalkeepers almost never win. At club level he took the Champions League four times, once with Montpellier and three times with THW Kiel, including the 2011-12 season in which Kiel won all 34 of their Bundesliga matches. His method was minimalist: a low, wide stance, almost no early commitment, and a willingness to leave one corner visible in order to invite the shot he had prepared for. He regularly finished major tournaments with save rates near forty percent, the informal threshold that separates a very good goalkeeper from a tournament-winning one.
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.