Rudar

Rudar's best league finish anywhere near the top flight came in 2022/23, when they placed second in the relegation group and kept their place among Croatian handball's elite for another year.

The club carries its identity from Rude, the mining district of Samobor it grew out of in 1959: Rudar means miner, and the nickname Kovari — the smiths — points to the same working past rather than anything invented for marketing.

Getting to the top flight took decades of climbing through regional football. A title in the 2. HRL Središte group in 1997/98 was followed, sixteen years later, by another in the 2. HRL Zapad group. It was back-to-back championships in 1. HRL Sjever, in 2017/18 and again in 2020/21, that finally pushed Rudar into the Premijer liga.

They play in dark blue at the Sportska dvorana Samobor, a hall that holds 700 — small even by the modest standards of Croatian handball, and a fair reflection of a club built on local development rather than recruitment budgets.

Staying up is the real contest each season. Against clubs from Zagreb and other larger towns with deeper squads and bigger budgets, Rudar's matches at the bottom of the Premijer liga table carry the weight of a relegation battle more often than a title race.