Linz

Handball Liga Austria opened its new season with Linz still riding the lift of ending a 28-year wait for the title, and the Hurricanes now carry the tag of defending champions into a competition where they had spent nearly three decades chasing that status rather than holding it.

The run to that 2024 crown went through a Best-of-Three final against Alpla HC Hard: a 27:31 loss in the opener, a 30:26 response, then a 31:30 win after overtime in the decider. It closed a gap stretching back to 1996, the last of three straight championships the club took in the mid-1990s alongside four Austrian Cups in a row. An earlier generation had already won four league titles in succession from 1978 to 1981, so the 2024 run put HC Linz AG level on eight championships with more than four decades between the first and the last.

European handball gave the club its nearest brush with continental silverware in 1994, when it reached the EHF Cup final and lost to the Spanish side CB Alzira. Ewald Humenberger played through much of that era and beyond, turning out for Linz across two spells between 1986 and 2008 on his way to becoming Austria's most-capped international. Klaus Stachelberger's ten seasons at the club left him its record scorer, a mark the current squad still plays in the shadow of even as Mislav Grgić topped the league's scoring charts in 2023/24.

Games against Alpla HC Hard have taken on the weight of a fixture both sides build their season around, the kind of meeting locals just call the Top-Duell. UHK Krems supplies the other rivalry that matters most to a club still measuring itself against the years it once dominated.