Thüringer HC Women

Bad Langensalza is a small town in Thuringia. The Salza-Halle seats only 2,000, rebuilt to European Handball Federation standard by 2020, and while the work went on the team borrowed courts in Erfurt and Nordhausen before coming home.

The club itself was assembled rather than born: in 2000, Handball-Club Erfurt merged with the handball section of SV Empor Bad Langensalza, joining a city side to a small-town one under a name that still carries both places. The lineage runs further back, into a factory sports collective in Erfurt from the 1960s, though little of that history survives beyond the name change from Motor-Nord-Erfurt to BSG Umformtechnik Erfurt. By 2006 the women's side had been split off into its own company to run as a professional operation, a separation that let Bad Langensalza's hall become the permanent home while the club's registered seat stayed in Erfurt.

Under Herbert Müller, in charge since 2010, Thüringer HC turned into the team no one in German women's handball wanted to draw. Six straight championships between 2011 and 2016 gave the Bundesliga a fixed point, and a seventh followed in 2018. The German Cup came three times, most recently in 2019. None of it, though, matched what arrived in 2025: a European League title, beating Ikast Håndbold 34-32 in the final in Graz. Supporters there call themselves Rote Wand, and the fixture against HC Leipzig, the Mitteldeutsches Derby, still draws the sharpest edge of that support.

A European Cup Winners' Cup run stopped at the semi-final stage in 2013, and a Champions League title has so far stayed out of reach for a club that has otherwise collected almost everything German handball has to offer.