AEK Athens HC

The G. Kassimatis Indoor Hall in Galatsi seats over 6,000 for concerts and other events, but AEK's handball team plays in front of barely 1,000 of them, the rest of the bowl curtained off or simply empty for league nights — a full house for the derby against Olympiacos looks nothing like a full house anywhere else in the building.

The department exists because two clubs stopped existing separately: on 12 July 2005 the AEK Athens general assembly voted it into being, and three weeks later, on 5 August, the Greek federation approved its merger with the handball section of GA Ilioupolis. Everything that followed happened fast. The first championship came in 2011, six years after founding; by 2023 there were five. AEK has since become the most successful Greek club in Europe, a status the football side of AEK, which went through relegation and financial collapse in 2013, never came close to matching.

The European Cup run of 2020–21 stands apart from the rest: a final against Ystads IF that AEK won outright, the only Greek handball trophy of its kind the club holds, bracketed by two runner-up finishes, in 2018 and again in 2025. Domestically the record reads five championships and five Greek Cups, the most recent cup arriving in 2025 as well.

The players who carried that spell of dominance drew from well beyond Greece — Mario Matic from Norway, Adama Sako from France, Nikola Jukic from Croatia — while the captaincy has stayed local, held by right wing Evangelos Arampatzis. Supporters call the team Magkes, a word that in Athenian slang means something between "tough guys" and "wide boys," and it belongs to the handball department alone, not the wider AEK badge.

Five Greek titles in twelve seasons, won by a club that did not exist before 2005.