Cherbourg

Two men, Victor Pierre and Claude Chadée, folded a pair of neighbourhood clubs, Jean-Macé and Léo-Lagrange, into one side in 1969, and the merger gave Equeurdreville-Hainneville, on the edge of Cherbourg, a handball team it has kept ever since. The name that stuck, "Les Mauves," comes from the heather that colours the surrounding heathland, and the same shade runs through the club's mauve-and-blue shirts.

For most of its life the club has sat below the top division, and its clearest brush with the summit came in 2021-2022, when it reached the Proligue final only to lose out to Sélestat. A run to the French Cup quarter-finals that same season, ended by Pau Nousty Sports, sits alongside an earlier promotion in 2008-2009, when the team won the National 2 title. The reserve side added its own championship in National 3 in 2024.

Matches against Caen carry a separate weight in the Manche, billed locally as the Normandy Derby, a fixture that draws on the two clubs' shared coastline rather than any single result between them. Eduard Fernández Roura has coached the squad since 2022, the same year the club left the Complexe Sportif Chantereyne, its home for decades, for the Salle Jean Jaurès; Chantereyne itself came down in 2024, leaving Jean Jaurès and its 1,951 seats as the only ground Les Mauves now know. The playing staff has carried a foreign accent for years, from Algerian internationals such as Rabah Soudani and Malik Boubaiou through to the Croatian goalkeeper Ivan Vekić, who joined in 2024.

What began as two clubs in the same town, merged by two men with a shared idea, still plays under the one name they gave it.