RK Vardar 1961

The Sportski Centar Jane Sandanski holds 7,500 inside a bowl built for European nights, and it is there that Vardar staged the run which made it the first club from the former Yugoslavia to lift the EHF Champions League. The final in Cologne, in May 2017, ended 24–23 against Paris Saint-Germain Handball; two years later, in Hamburg, Telekom Veszprém went down 27–24. Both wins fell inside the stretch between 2013 and 2020 when the Russian businessman Sergey Samsonenko financed the club and brought in players such as Ivan Čupić and Timur Dibirov, whose names are still tied to that era in Skopje.

The club traces itself to 1961, formed out of RK Grafichar Skopje and players from RK Partizan, and sits under the wider Vardar Sports Club founded in 1947. It shares its "Crveno-Crni" nickname, and its red and black colours, with the football side of the same organisation.

Samsonenko's departure in May 2020 left the club in financial and political disarray. Mihajlo Mihajlovski, a former president, came back to take charge, and the entity was restructured and renamed RK Vardar 1961 to draw a line under the old company's debts. What survived the change was the academy: Filip Taleski, who came through it, now captains the side that rebuilt around him rather than around imported names.

Domestically almost nothing has slipped past Vardar. The derby against Eurofarm Pelister has replaced the old city rivalry with RK Metalurg Skopje as the fixture that matters most now, and in the league itself the count of championships stands at 16.