Bayer Leverkusen Women

Leverkusen is a company town before it is anything else, and its handball team carries that name into the Bundesliga's record books as Werkselfen — the Works Eleven. Twelve German championships, all won between 1965 and 1987, make Bayer Leverkusen the most successful club in the competition's history, and nine DHB-Pokal titles add to that tally.

The peak came in a single stretch: eight championships and six cup wins between 1979 and 1987, a run that also carried the team to a European final in 1984, lost to Radnički Belgrade. A quieter European success followed in 2005, when Leverkusen won the EHF Challenge Cup.

That history sat alongside an uninterrupted presence in the top flight going back to when the Bundesliga itself started in 1975 — fifty seasons without a single relegation.

Franziska Garcia-Almendaris, once a player at the club, now coaches it. Matches against 1.