Besançon

Grand Besançon Doubs Handball spends this season in Proligue, French handball's second tier, still trading blows with Dijon Métropole Handball in the fixture everyone in the region calls the Derby Franche-Comté.

The club did not start out chasing promotion. It was formed in 1970 as Entente sportive bisontine, a single mixed club housing both a men's and a women's section under one roof. That arrangement held until 1992, when the two split into separate entities; the men's side carried on as Entente sportive Besançon masculine. The current name and structure date only to 2015, when GBDH emerged from a pooling of resources among handball clubs across the wider Grand Besançon Métropole.

Les Bisontins, as the men's team is known locally, built its recent history from the bottom up rather than the top down: back-to-back Division 2 titles in 1980 and 1996 got the club moving, and Nationale 1 championships in 2007 and 2010 pushed it into the tier it now occupies. Croatian centre back Luka Brkljačić has been part of that climb in two spells, first from 2016 to 2018 and again since 2020.

The women's team, split off since 1992 and now run as Entente sportive Besançon féminin, built a different kind of record, lifting the Coupe de France three times in the early 2000s — 2001, 2002 and 2005 — before adding the Coupe de France Fédérale in 2024.

Matches are played at the Palais des sports Ghani-Yalouz, which holds 3,380 for handball.